![]() The small boy who loves and tries to shield his mother becomes, by degrees and for one reason and another, a sociopath so frightening that he is dubbed "Kinderschreck" (or "bogeyman") by a German living in the neighborhood. O'Brien relates the story of his childhood and his ruination in twenty swift, masterly pages: the sadistic father the loving but powerless mother, with whom Michen identified totally the rough, unsupervised reform school the monks, some kindly, some abusive, all trapped in the clutches of the monolithic Church and most of all the community-self-protective, exclusive, unforgiving. Michen O'Kane has been warped by his environment as surely as have these pine trees. "Woodland straddling two counties and several townlands," reads the novel's opening sentence, "a drowsy corpus of green, broken only where the odd pine has struck up on its own, spindly, freakish, the stray twigs on either side branched, cruciform-wise." "Maimed, stark, and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious." She has used central symbols with great effectiveness in the past (in Wild Decembers, for instance, a smart new tractor brought to the village by a smart new man stood for everything the novel's stunted protagonist longed for and feared), and here, in In the Forest, she fashions a powerful metaphor for the character of one of Ireland's most blighted sons: a forbidding image of a forest that is as blighted as he. "When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees," O'Brien once said. O'Brien's new novel, In the Forest, is, like her two previous novels, inspired by a true story: the 1994 murders of a young woman, her little son, and a priest by a deranged man in County Clare. ![]() Wild Decembers (2000) is a Faulknerian tale that explores the unspoken ancestral rages and passions within an isolated rural community in the west of Ireland. Down By the River (1997) is a fictionalized version of the infamous "X trial," in which an adolescent girl who had been raped by a friend's father was taken to England for a legal abortion and then pressured to return to Ireland, where she became the center of a nationwide debate. House of Splendid Isolation (1994) tells the story of an IRA fighter who takes refuge in the home of a lonely woman its unwillingness to choose sides politically offended many readers. "What I am after is a bit of magic, and I do not want to write tracts or to read them," she insists. None of her books has been specifically political rather, she has in her past few novels taken political and social issues and transformed them into art. In the mid-1990s, though, O'Brien's work underwent a significant change as she juiced up her style to a new level of lushness and broadened her fictional scope to include not merely people within Ireland but Ireland itself: its history, politics, and character. The novels of her middle period, such as Casualties of Peace (1966) and Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), continued in a personal vein: they tend to center on women with failed marriages, alienated children, and unhappy love affairs. Ireland, however, has remained her subject. I feel I would have been watched, would have been judged (even more!), and would have lost that priceless commodity called freedom." "I do not think that I would have written anything if I had stayed. ![]() "You have to go if you find your roots too threatening, too impinging," she has said. In 1954 she left Ireland and moved to London, where she still lives and writes. O'Brien's debut novel, The Country Girls, was banned in Ireland, as were her six subsequent novels. O'Brien has occasionally been compared to Colette, and her early works do bear a certain resemblance to the Claudine novels, although they are, on balance, angrier. ![]() The early novels were personal, autobiographical to a certain extent, and largely about women coping with the inconvenient reality of their own intelligence and sexuality within a culture O'Brien had experienced as "enclosed, fervid and bigoted." With disenchantment and sometimes heavy irony (the lives of Girls in Their Married Bliss are anything but blissful, for example), they are portrayed dealing with sex in and (more often) out of marriage, the destructiveness of lust, the passions and the claustrophobia of family life. O'Brien likes to quote James Joyce's description of Ireland as a sow that eats her farrow, but in her own fiction she depicts it more as an imprisoning mother from whose stifling embrace one must struggle to escape. Her first novels- The Country Girls (1960) and its two sequels, The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964)-constitute a deliberately shocking declaration of independence, a defiant cutting of the umbilical cord attaching their author to Mother Ireland. The fictional world of Edna O'Brien has evolved a great deal during the more than forty years she has been writing. ![]()
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