O’Brien retains her ability to shock
Artists often revisit the same themes and preoccupations in their work, though only the great ones make of the process a rebirth, not a rehash.
Through her long career, Edna O’Brien has continually turned her attention to the cruelty men can inflict on women and girls. It’s almost 60 years since the publication of The Country Girls, the sexually charged coming-of-age novel that established her reputation and notoriety. In the conservative Ireland of her day, the book was banned and burned, prompting O’Brien to leave for London, where she has remained ever since.
The Country Girls’ licentiousness wouldn’t lift today’s eyebrows, yet with her new novel, The Little Red Chairs, O’Brien proves she still has the ability to shock, which she does while staying true to her interests.
In it, a Serbian war criminal posing as a sex therapist and alternative healer called Dr. Vlad (a hardly disguised Radovan Karadzic) beguiles the inhabitants of an Irish town until his identity is revealed.
The novel’s central event, in which the married but childless Fidelma, who has become purposely impregnated with Vlad’s child, is brutally attacked by thugs seeking retribution against him, is profoundly, unforgettably disturbing, not just for the manner of its writing, but for the way it contrasts with the lightly comedic, almost casual tone of what comes before.
Fidelma’s experience is so shattering that she is driven, like her creator, to London. There she finds a place for herself living and working amidst refugees, migrants and other survivors.
Later, she ends up at Vlad’s warcrimes trial in The Hague, where her hopes for resolution merely become further proof of her naivety about the dark possibilities of human nature. Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries.