The book:
Edna O’Brien’s groundbreaking first novel, The Country Girls, dealt with female sexual awakening and social issues in a troubled post-war Ireland, and was immediately banned and burnt upon its publication in the 1960s. Author of dozens of written works, credited with helping launch a new generation of Irish writers, and even officially apologised to by the President of Ireland (albeit over half a century after The Country Girls was released), O’Brien is one Ireland’s most esteemed writers. We have chosen her first novel in a decade, The Little Red Chairs – already lauded by many as her masterpiece – as your first Shelf Improvement book of 2016.
The lives of members of a small Irish Village are shaken when a cloaked, white-haired and bearded stranger arrives, bringing disruption and mystery in his wake. A self-proclaimed healer and poet, the village’s inhabitants are initially wary, but soon enchanted by this stranger. Based on Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic, who similarly fled and hid as an alternative medicine doctor before being taken to the Hague for war crimes, the charismatic doctor’s presence permeates each page. To tell more of the plot is not necessary, save to say that this is a truly spellbinding novel.
What the Guardian thought:
Edna O’Brien’s new novel, her first in a decade, has already been hailed as “her masterpiece” by that master-of-them-all Philip Roth. And he’s right. This is a spectacular piece of work, massive and ferocious and far-reaching, yet also at times excruciatingly, almost unbearably, intimate. Holding you in its clutches from first page to last, it dares to address some of the darkest moral questions of our times while never once losing sight of the sliver of humanity at their core.
It begins arrestingly. A wanted Balkan war criminal, disguised as a self-styled “holistic healer” (he quickly drops the term “sex therapist” when he clocks the responses), fetches up in a little village on the west coast of Ireland. The parallels with the “butcher of Bosnia” Radovan Karadzic cannot be accidental, but neither is the novel’s power contingent upon them. With his “white beard and white hair tied up in a top-knot”, and his talk of herbs and tinctures and his constant “spouting” of Latin verses, “Doctor Vlad” sends a ripple of suspicion through the small community.
The local garda has a half-hearted go at arresting him, only to be appeased with chat about football. A feisty nun, deciding that someone has to investigate this man, offers herself up for a hot stone massage – a scene that manages to be both enjoyably comic and queasily chilling at the same time. Most significantly of all, though, beautiful Fidelma, suffocating in a lonely, childless marriage, swiftly falls under the doctor’s spell and finds herself begging him to give her a baby.
And that’s just the beginning. To say too much about what happens next would spoil a truly gripping read. In fact, the novel turns out to be quite breathtaking in its twists and turns, its capacity to change shape and form and tone.
Meanwhile, it’s impossible not to be knocked out by the sly perfection of O’Brien’s prose. The effect is cumulative and the novel’s power creeps up on you; nothing is wasted, nothing forced. And O’Brien’s eye for detail is exemplary. All the quotidian detail of modern life, both rural and urban – even its omnipresent technology – is done with insight and wit.
The real genius of this novel – and I don’t use the word lightly – is to take us right up close to worlds that we normally only read about in newspapers, to make us sweat and care about them, and at the same time create something that feels utterly original, urgent, beautiful. It’s hard to believe that any novel could do more. And it’s hard – no, almost impossible – to believe that O’Brien is in her ninth decade, for this is absolutely the work of a writer in her prime and at the very height of her phenomenal powers.
Julie Myerson - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski
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The Green Road by Anne Enright
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The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
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