Back to the old country
Francis King
DOWN BY THE RIVER by Edna O'Brien Weidenfeld, £15.99, pp. 265
In this new novel, clearly based on a much publicised real-life case, Edna O'Brien tells the story of a pubescent Irish girl made pregnant by her violent, drunken father and so precipitating a nationwide argument as to whether she should be allowed to cross over to England to have an abortion. With the media at present in a frenzy over the questions of whether one woman should have aborted one of her twins and whether another woman should abort at least some of her eight foetuses, what theme could be more timely and fresh? But there is a counterbalancing staleness in O'Brien's depiction of a rural Ireland of hard-drinking, time-wasting, brutal fathers, put-upon, work-weary and religiose mothers, and children in whom the passionate instincts of youth are con- stantly at war with the rigid puritanism of their educations.
This is a world already all too familiar from those wonderfully vigorous and fierY novels of the Sixties and Seventies in which O'Brien inveighed against the repressive upbringings and the lack of sexual and career fulfilment endured by so many of her fellow countrywomen. Kate Brady and Baba Brennan, heroines of the first three novels, eventually flee to London in search of 'life'. The heroine of this novel flees W London in search of death for the life with- in her. For O'Brien Ireland is essentially a pagan country. As Judge Mahoney, one of the judges with whom rests the decision whether Mary should be allowed to have an abortion, puts it:
We're pagans .. . Pagan urges run in our blood . Pagan love . Pagan lust .. . Pagan hate ... It's why we need God so badly.
For O'Brien Ireland is also a country of fanaticism. As the two sides battle over the pregnant girl, they totally ignore the terror and anguish which at one point drive her to attempt suicide by pulling a nail out of a wall and slitting her wrist with it. Some of O'Brien's 'pro-life' women, so self-congrat- ulatory in their sense of their own virtue and so harsh in their condemnation of what they see as the moral frailty of others, are near to caricatures. But of these crusaders O'Brien produces one brilliant portrait
of a beautiful girl, whose seemingly pliant charm takes on the hardness of enamel as soon as she begins to lecture her followers on the outrage of abortion, to hand round gory photographs and to distribute tenden- tious literature. She has had an audience with the Pope, who has only confirmed her both in her crusade and in her pride in her spiritual eminence.
There was a time when O'Brien's prose almost justified Arthur Schlesinger Jnr's hyperbolic claim, 'No one today writes lovelier, fresher, more glowing and more Mordant English than Edna O'Brien.' Sadly, that prose, once so spare and sinewy, all too often now shows signs of literary obesity. As the swirling impasto of adjec- tives, similes and metaphors becomes increasingly thick and clotted, so the pic- ture becomes less and less distinct. Are church bells ringing along the quays of Dublin? We read: Bells are ringing, summoning the faithful to morning mass, cordant, discordant, liquidy matins, boomerangs lauding, gold gonged, holy.
fl the first paragraph of all, the sun is invoked as '0 brazen egg-gold albatross.' Later golf balls are likened to 'freak skulls', and a woman's face to 'a turd of pink rub- ber'. Yet from time to time O'Brien comes UP with a truly apt and arresting image — a Woman's arms described as 'spawned with freckles, the vaccination marks glaringly white', frost likened to 'grains of coarse salt bristling in the ruts'.
An oddity throughout is the paucity of question marks. Surely some sub-editor could have reminded O'Brien of their omission? Another oddity is O'Brien's love of archaic or nonce words ('surgent', 'scut-
, 'peradventure', 'revelrous) or words of a. kind that will send the reader to the dic- tionary ('rapparee', 'pampooties', 'pads). But if this book, as tipsy with its verbal overindulgence as one of those rhapsodic Prose-poems produced by William Sharp/ 'Fiona Macleod' in the Nineties, too often waddles and lurches from one of its
climactic scenes to another, there is no doubt that, once those scenes are reached, some of them have an incandescent power. Particularly searing are the death of the errant father and the miscarriage of the tormented heroine, both near the close.
When O'Brien controls both her ram- pant indignation and her luxuriant style, one still gets many a rewarding glimpse of the potent writer of the early books.
Previous page
