Monuments to truth

Saints and Sinners

It all seems so innocent now, but O’Brien helped usher in modern Ireland, and has consistently tracked its course from 1960s innocence to the sour cynicism left in the wake of the Celtic tiger. Baba and Kate were young women who felt stifled, oppressed by the grey pieties of church and state, and optimistically hopeful of finding a life that reflected the vitality coursing through their blood.

But O’Brien has always been expert at reminding us that escape comes at a cost: the past stays with us, in the form of memory, family, or simply the psychological damage done in childhood. Some people can never escape from themselves and the world that formed them.

Her characters, naturally, are older now, but the sense of dislocation remains. Old men retire, old paramilitaries get out of jail, old women struggle hope- lessly on. In this latest collection, Shovel Kings describes an old man, Rafferty, who has spent decades working as a navvy in England. When a chance to return ‘home’ turns up, he finds that home no longer exists: the Ireland of his distant memories is gone, replaced by something much more alien than the comfortable poverty of Kilburn and Camden Town.

This story is also a fine example of O’Brien’s subtle way of stitching a narrative together. On the surface, the plot is a familiar one, with a tried and trusted resolution seen in countless other plays and stories. But O’Brien chooses to tell Rafferty’s tale through the voice of a woman who meets him intermittently, and who sees his life as a series of snapshots. This narrator is not quite Edna O’Brien, but there are parallels; she drops casual hints about her own life, mentions her visits to doctors and her neurotic problems. The story builds, becoming less stereo- typical as nuances are added: in the end, far from being a piece of routinely sentimental paddywhackery, it grows into a genuine literary achievement. We realise, with some surprise, that the real subject of the story is not Rafferty at all, but his iconic meaning for this mysterious narrator.

At such moments, O’Brien is a virtuoso of the short form. She does not quite have the stylistic power of the late John McGahern, and there are occasional gaucheries, awkward constructions and narrative loose ends. But her willingness to engage in experiment — such as the Joycean flow of consciousness in the story Madame Cassandra — is exemplary. Her ability to weave complex psychological resonances into a superficially simple plot is superb: at times she hits a sort of narrative density and compression worthy of Borges or Nabokov.

Above all, her stories reveal a rare degree of sophistication in construction. Her best stories are compressed novels rather than isolated anecdotes or one-note epiphanies. There are levels of meaning which only reveal themselves on a second reading. Even her epiphanic moments — such as the misery of a lonely bed-and-breakfast landlady who catches some guests in flagrante — have depth. These are not simple characters, least of all to themselves.

Some stories, such as Plunder, break away from British and Irish themes for a nameless middle-European setting, where a woman is raped by invading mercenaries. Behind the Kafkaesque horror of the situation, and the character’s urge to survive amid appalling atrocities, O’Brien shows her feminist steel. She is a long way, here, from the innocent charm of the traditional Irish story, but she has the range and vocabulary to make it work.

There is humour too, and some sly barbs at the expense of contemporary Ireland. In Inner Cowboy, a hapless loner finds himself being used by sharper, less dreamy characters — a crooked quarry boss and a gang of bank robbers who want him to hide the money. As he dreams his way towards inevitable doom, there are sharp observations of the characters who think they are smarter than him. One, for example, objects violently to the word “can’t”: “Can’t! [O’Brien writes] Can’t! ... Can’t is a verb he does not tolerate. Can’t does not close a deal. There are no prizes for can’t. Can’t is the breast that losers are suckled on...” This shows her ear for the mangled language of the past decade, when Hiberno-English had an ugly collision with the self-serving slogans of corporate jargon and self-help manuals. In the crash, the authenticity of the older language was lost, and replaced by the hollow pieties of finance-speak.

In the 1960s, when O’Brien was a young writer, she helped her readers to see beyond the staid pieties of de Valera’s state and the Roman church. 50 years on, she is still pointing to the hollowness of official language. Now it is bankers, managers and the new rich who utter empty words, but she deconstructs their vapidity with ease.

In contrast, several of her characters seem most truly themselves, most authentic and real, when alone or sitting quietly. They contemplate nature or show silent concern for each other’s well-being, far from the sonorous jargons of the new dispensation.

Some critics have never quite taken O’Brien seriously, with her rural origins and Joycean flights of fancy. Some have said that she aspires to a literary position which her books do not deserve. But this latest collection shows the reverse to be the case: she is a real writer, her wisdom and maturity adding extra layers of resonance to her quietly sophisticated stories. Her timelessness is that of a writer seeking what is true and real in human nature, not the confusion of a simple romantic adrift between the 1960s and the 21st century.

Some of her characters, admittedly, are in that position. But it would be a grave mistake to conflate the author and her creations. O’Brien is a significant literary voice with a great stylistic range, capable of sketching anger, hopelessness, guilt, remorse and, yes, even joy, in a few well-chosen words.