Turn the dark cloud inside out . . .

Caroline Moore

TIME AND TIDE by Edna 0' Brien Viking, £14.99, pp. 325 The heroine of Time and Tide, briefly and disastrously in love with Duncan, `mesmeriser, drinker and fallen cherub', finds that

suddenly remembering him, she thought how, when he held her, the clasp had some- thing of the fervour of her own land, ancient, turbulent, and beyond pity.

'Her own land' is, of course, Ireland; and the most unbreakable grip it exerts in this novel is in the self-intoxicating poetry of the prose. It is heady stuff, this Irish love of language; and for much of the book its verbal torrents are matched to great sweep- ing tides of female emotion — particularly mother-love and madness. The effect is undeniably powerful, overwhelming even; and the novel is crammed with unforget- table images (champagne is like 'chiffon that tickled'; 'the hate he had for her was like a pilot light, waiting not for extinction but to be re-lit').

Yet at times, the hothouse intensity of such metaphors is almost distracting: the language begins to seem its own justifica- tion. Here is a moment in the novel when the heroine's teenage son has stormed out of the house after a violent quarrel, just as a Russian poet upon the wireless recites `City of Bells and My Heart':

'City of Bells and My Heart,' she said again and again in an endeavour to repiece the moments, embattled moments which at the time she could not endure but which no doubt would return to shame her and to startle, as when upon opening a shutter in winter time, a host of sleeping butterflies come rising up.

The passage, like the novel, is one of subjective intensity, immersion in experi- ence; yet the Miltonic elaboration of the metaphor ('as when') introduces a curious distancing, and our attention is displaced onto an image of apparently inappropriate summery beauty. At moments of crisis, it is true, the effect does work, by suggesting the heightened detachment that comes from emotional overload. The problem is that the novel is close to becoming 326

A Word on Bullying

The English are good folk to go among; Tractile, unused to violence of the tongue, Their natural aggression is inchoate: But Scots are hard, hard men. A Scottish poet Is still a hard, hard man and lets you know it.

Be nice to people; they'll be nice to you My English lesson but it isn't true.

Better to learn the butcher-bird, the Shrike That sticks his enemies up on a spike, Better to learn pre-emptive counterstrike And love your enemies as I love mine: I treasure him, my own, my Valentine, Valentine Tudball — this exultant Jock With the amazing handle, thought to mock My name, and turn me to a laughing-stock.

Why did he? Why? You snivelling hypocrite, Because he could. Eh Whitworth? Worth a wit?

Eh Shitworth? Worth shit all? Bang on, sweet slanger, My handsome Valentine, my bold haranguer, My stormtroop darling and my doppelganger.

John Whitworth

pages of crisis.

The first section of the book shows Nell's battle with her husband for custody of her two sons, Paddy and Tristan. Her husband is called Walter, but his name is rarely used (one of the peculiarities of this book, which adds childish intensity, is its odd way with introductions: names are withheld, or produced as if the characters are already well known). He is full of fads which turn to pathological fancies, and becomes bitter, devious, obsessively mean and intermittently violent. Nell's struggle with this monster is gripping stuff. She is just fey, incompetent and hysterical enough to make one wonder for a time whether Walter is as bad as she paints him, and to wonder if she will manage to be convincing in court. As it turns out, Walter is just as nasty and mad as she imagines: one is not supposed to question Nell's point of view in this book — even when she says of elder- berries that they seemed to be saying something. Saying 'we are elderberries, take note of us.'

Throughout the book, the boys are utter- ly con vincing. In the early parts, they are obstreperous, charming and insecure; they resent, compete and conspire with each other, and provoke complaints from the neighbours with their noisy hilarity. They are thoroughly uncontrollable and spoiled; but the force of the writing is such that we delight with Nell in their hyperactive spirits. When Paddy and Tristan are packed off to boarding school, however, the author as well as their doting mother misses them. The subjective inconsequentiality of the narration works well when the strong drive of the narrative and of Nell's maternal emotions gives it dramatic direction. But when Nell's life becomes temporarily direc- tionless, a series of encounters, part of one's mind is left free to notice how literary the devices are.

Nell has a Jean Rhys-ish encounter with

a rich man who takes her for a frigid whore — and never appears in the book again- She falls in love with Duncan, whose barrel-shaped body in a too-small stockinette jersey is a nicely idiosyncratic object of desire, but whose drunken maunderings would alert anyone but Nell to the fact that he is a boring Piss- artist: 1 want to know you . . . no broken ends, . . . no explanations . . . the summa of love,' and here he became sad as he asked the porous air, How the fuck do you sing summa and what key is it in?

She is betrayed, takes drugs with a lasciv- ious doctor, and is tipped into madness. The descriptions of this are comparable to Antonia White and Emily Coleman, which is to say that they are powerful, but curi- ously dated. This is lyric madness, 1930s style:

She went out to see the flowers. Some were beautiful, some threatening. The rosebuds

were little fingers, fingers poking at things, the colours much more ravishing than she had ever remembered . . . She longed to be in the country in a meadow, the swards warm and high, someone beside her, cradling, cradling her.

The most unconvincingly arty episode is an encounter with Dolly, a stripper, who gives an impassioned account of a night on the high altar of love and fucking' with her 'Black Prince'. One hears only the author's voice in her unlikely lyric fluency.

Whenever Paddy and Tristan return to the book, the novel becomes firmly rooted again. The boys grow into equally convinc- ing teenagers, uncouth and touching; and the changes in them are charted through Nell's small shocks of dismay and bereave- ment. These small-scale tragedies of letting-go — and a potentially larger one, when Paddy takes to drugs — foreshadow Nell's ultimate loss. Paddy is drowned when a boat full of party-goers sinks in the Thames, like the Marchioness; Tristan leaves her to take up with his dead brother's pregnant girlfriend. These, the climaxes of the book, are revealed in the prologue, so I am spoiling no surprises. Paddy's death is no less emotionally battering for being fore-signalled and fore- dreaded. I found the last section of the book almost unbearable: my feeble resistance to the tides of emotion and lan- guage was overcome, and my English inhibitions drowned at last.