Observer Review: In The Forest By Edna O’Brien Essay, Research Paper

Sacrifice of the innocentsIn the ForestEdna O’BrienWeidenfeld & Nicholson ?16.99, pp217Edna O’Brien’s early novels were greeted by two sounds – murmurs of approval and the crackle of flames. The Lonely Girl appeared in 1962 with some softly-spoken words of publicity (’Miss O’Brien has an unusual gift for treating important things in a seemingly casual way’) while a priest in her home village made a bonfire of his parishioners’ copies of The Country Girls.Forty years on, not much has changed. O’Brien is still after critical approval and still surprised to find herself engulfed by flames. In the Forest has been welcomed by her old friend Harold Pinter as a masterpiece while arousing a critical storm in Ireland. In the novel, she recreates the horrific events of 1994, when a young mother, her son and a priest were murdered in County Clare. Their murderer was a local man with a history of psychiatric problems.In the novel, the mother is Eily Ryan and her murderer Michen O’Kane, the ‘Kinderschrek’, psychotic since childhood and brutalised by a series of young offenders’ institutions where he is abused by priests and gang-raped by inmates. Eily, on the other hand, embodies the most naive kind of innocence – she lives in a tumbledown cottage in a field, where she and Maddie, her three-year-old, create an old-fashioned bohemian anarchy.O’Kane becomes obsessed with her, watches her through the window at night, names her his ‘goat-girl’, and after kidnapping her and Maddie takes them to the woods where he holds them at gunpoint, rapes her and kills them both.The novel is powered by the fateful dynamic between Eily and O’Kane. This reaches its crux in a long, gripping chapter, ‘In the Forest’, which follows them from O’Kane’s unnanounced appearance in her kitchen to her death in the wood, ‘Maddie clinging to her, their desperate cries as one, going up to the trees and down to the wisps of dew that have outlived the morning, rising and expiring, dying and perpetuated in that catacomb of green, up there at the edge of the world, on the point of sacrifice’.O’Brien’s overblown prose occasionally finds a subject big enough for it. In fact, she’s always been waiting for material that will be up to the challenge of her ramshackle syntax and runaway imagery. She’s found it here; the novel works because the style and the subject matter are a perfect match. In her account, the County Clare murders sound like an O’Brien story waiting to happen – feckless girl meets wicked boy who ruins her life and kills a priest for good measure.The heroines of The Country Girls trilogy were soaked in the bittersweet spirit of O’Brien. The plots were closely autobiographical and the characters treated highly indulgently. That indulgence expired years ago – the heroine of In the Forest is absurd, lost in a free-love moment – and O’Brien puts more enthusiasm into her depiction of O’Kane, whose schizophrenic rants are suited to her prose.This is an ambitious, important book, dealing with difficult subjects directly and courageously. Yet we never get close up to the characters. It’s gripping, but we’re gripped more by O’Brien’s verbal shenanigans than by the plot.It’s ironic that Peter Carey had to invent this kind of hypnotic anti-grammatical voice for Ned Kelly in The True History of the Kelly Gang, when O’Brien had it all along.