YOU'RE WELCOME TO ULSTER by Menna Gallie. 256 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.
A beautifully written, cleanly unsentimental love story is cause enough for celebration. But Author Gallie has done more. She has skillfully used as background the divided heart of present-day Northern Ireland.
Welsh-born Sarah Thomas is a middle-aged widow working in Cambridge, England. Threatened by breast cancer, she seeks a "last" holiday in Ulster with two close Catholic friends, Caroline and Colum Moore, and a former lover, a Protestant left-wing journalist named James McNeil.
Her sentimental journey creates more chill than charm. She is unsettled to find Belfast decorated for the festival of July 12—the date in 1690 of the Battle of the Boyne which "ensured the preservation of the true Protestant Christian faith against the Whore of Rome."
Once arrived at the Moores' house in County Down, Sarah finds the family rife with potential martyrs: Colum Moore, an English professor trying to resist public political involvement; his devout, naively nationalistic wife, carrying their eighth child and breeding vulnerability; her sister, Una, an angry activist spouting Marx and Marcuse who lives like a nun among grotesque religious relics. Even Sarah's old lover has become a marked man as a Protestant journalist championing the Catholic cause.
Like her heroine, Author Gallie is Welsh-born. But she has got the Gaelic in her, and in the country of the word she is no stranger.
ROOTS OF INVOLVEMENT: THE U.S. IN ASIA 1784-1971 by Marvin Kalb and Elie Abel. 336 pages. Norton. $8.95.
Even your more informed dove is unlikely to remember that the debate over policy toward the Philippines around 1900 sounded very much like the contemporary argument over Viet Nam. Or that Dean Acheson himself once acknowledged that back during the Truman Administration, Washington's approach to Indochina was a "muddled hodgepodge/'
One accomplishment of Roots of Involvement is to record, in cool temper and spare style, how that hodgepodge developed into the Viet Nam War. The authors are Marvin Kalb, CBS diplomatic correspondent, and Elie Abel, his former NBC rival, now dean of the Columbia School of Journalism. They have combined scholarship legwork to construct this useful chronology. They also offer a thesis: that the Viet Nam War is not an aberration but part of the "inexorable progression" of past misconceptions and blunders, including the desire to bolster France, the general goal of containing Communism, and finally a specific fear of the Chinese.
Still, as Kalb and Abel also demonstrate, the war that no President wanted might have been averted. There were moments in all the post-World War II Administrations when some official wisdom might have saved Lyndon Johnson —not to mention the U.S. and Vietnamese peoples—from the results of the decision to intervene with combat divisions in 1965.
UNDER THE COLORS by Milovan Djilas. 557 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $9.75.