In July 2008 the Butcher of Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić, was finally arrested for his crimes. He’d been hiding in plain sight in Vienna, working as a new age healer and sex therapist, disguised simply but effectively in beard and ponytail. In her latest novel, Edna O’Brien boldly transplants this haunting example of the banality of evil to her own country: a small seaside village in the west of Ireland.
When “Dr Vlad” arrives in Cloonoila, he sits by the river in the mist and listens to the sea and the screeching peacocks: had he read a few more novels and a little less Serbian nationalist poetry, he might even have recognised the place as an Edna O’Brien landscape. The year, however, is 2013, and O’Brien shows us how the Irish countryside has become conscious of its own loveliness, adding a sculpture to its river and a hotel to its castle, and even “old farm machinery” and a “replica of an Irish cottage” to the village. The villagers, though, remain, as O’Brien says, “innocent”, and she lets them speak to us directly in her characteristic, slippery mixture of poignancy, forthright wit and blatant, endearing self-deception. There is Father Damien the priest, Fifi the misty and lonely widow, Sister Bonaventure the ancient nun, and Dara and Mona who run the pub and hence everything else.
Most importantly, there is Fidelma McBride, our classic O’Brien heroine: very beautiful, “with a crop of black hair and the whitest skin”; in possession of a gothic past – she grew up in a “dirt poor family” she associates with “the skeleton of a rotting horse that died on us, its bones bleaching in the field” – a missing patrimony, in the shape of a boutique once furnished with “glass floor lamps and pale Flemish tapestry”, and an oppressive, much older husband, Jack.
Jack and Fidelma, in fact, with their gramophones, raspberry canes and bicycles, their nastily sexy virgin marriage and curious honeymoon in Rome, seem to belong more to the 50s than the present. But there is a more contemporary set of voices here too. The kitchen staff of the Country House Hotel are “Burmese, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Slovakian, Polish”, and of an evening entertain each other with lengthy, uninterrupted accounts of their migrant journeys. Their voices are less inflected than the villagers’, their characters more solidly virtuous, and no one has a solid grasp of verb forms or the definite article. As a result, they tend to sound rather similar - “He say ‘Let’s go for a walk Hedda.’ He very insistent”; “I go back to Switzerland and am alone. In time I recover. I think in basement of my cousin’s house. I have plum brandy from 1967, fifty percent proof.” The effect of these bleak, strip-lit testimonies set against the shaded, shifting, shifty voices of the village is an odd one: like a documentary intercut with a Renoir film.
The dreams of Dr Vlad, meanwhile, supply images from a third genre – Dr Strangelove, perhaps, or German expressionism – for Vlad is periodically haunted by “his old friend K”, who seems to be both Kafka and Conrad’s Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. K can conjure up not only nightmarish pictures of chopped limbs and kohlrabi, but pages and pages of highly formed rhetoric, literary references and direct historical accusation. As other people’s dreams so often are, K’s sections are rather dull to read: it’s not just that he can’t paragraph, we also can’t know what his terms are, or where he is coming from, or what to believe.
We do believe, though, all too well, Vlad’s progress in the credulous and gentle village. Mona and Dara lead him into cosy pub chats. He rescues Fifi’s trapped dog with horrible and attentive tenderness. Father Damien debates orthodoxy with him; Sister Bonaventure visits him for a hot stone massage and then brings him to the village reading group. In a moment of high comedy, the gardai nearly arrest him for breaching health and safety regulations. Soon “his name is on everyone’s lips, Dr Vlad this and Dr Vlad that”; poor, lonely Fidelma has fallen in love with him and wants him to father the child she never had. We, too, are teased into complicity. We don’t want the villain to be caught, because we don’t want Fidelma to be hurt.
Soon enough, however, the documentary voices catch up with Vlad: “All boys he round up. Many thousand in one day.” At the same time, the Kafkaesque nightmarish punishments catch up with Fidelma: the moment when “rats come to sup and she can hear their tongues lapping up their pools of warm blood” is far from the worst of it. From here on, the nightmare and documentary strands take over the novel. Fidelma goes on a picaresque tour of immigrant London, and witnesses dozens more testimonies in broken English covering every issue from FGM to exploitative cleaners’ wages. She also makes a visit to Vlad’s trial in The Hague, some of which is Kafkaesque and some of which seems to be actually a nightmare, though the texture of both is the same.
Edna O’Brien apparently researched this novel carefully: it shows in the variety of stories and range of reference and facts. It does not show, however, in authenticity of character and voice: these spring from her own vast experience and writerly imagination. None of the moments O’Brien adapts or borrows, even from Kafka and Shakespeare, is as piercing as the moments she invents herself. None of the stories here, however terrible in content, brings evil home as well as the moment the dictator digs the jack russell from the ground: “He worked the spade gently, until the frozen clay began to shift … and eased her out. She looked like a rag, muddied, one ear torn, and quivering all over. ‘She’s been in the wars,’ he said.”
• Kate Clanchy’s latest book is The Not-Dead and the Saved (Picador). To order The Little Red Chairs for £15.19 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
