Honor Tracy is best known for a novel published in 1956, The Straight and Narrow Path. When it appeared, critics sought to define its appeal by comparing its author with Evelyn Waugh; the Irish, at whom its darts were aimed, asked what this woman meant coming over to tell them what was wrong with them; many people declared it to be the funniest book they had ever read; and it very soon came to be regarded as a classic comic novel. Success of this kind has often meant disaster to the writer, but in Tracy's case this early success acted as model for the dozen novels she has written since, always with a refreshing awareness of changes in the worlds she describes. As well as providing in her Irish novels a satirical view of Ireland as a corrective to the patriotic romantic works of the Anglo-Irish renaissance, perhaps the...