Edna O'Brien : The Real Deal

(1930 -2024)

“I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home”

So begins the first lines of The Country Girls, Edna O’ Brien’s first novel. These lines: urgent, compelling talking of both the heart and foreboding announced a new voice not just in Irish literature but to the world  

It was in 1960 that we first met Baba and Cait, two girls brought up in rural Ireland who long, in both silly and sensible ways for very different lives to that of their mothers. The expression of that longing , for love, for sex, for freedom was at the time a dangerous thing. In Ireland itself the book was banned It was  was publicly burnt in O’Brien’s hometown of Tuamgraney. Charlie Haughey,  then the Minister for Justice declared the book “ filth”  and and said it should not be allowed inside any decent home.

Instead the book shot O’Brien to international fame as well as notoriety.  It is astonishing now to think that she wrote the book as a single parent  in just three weeks. It was I think, a book that had to be written. It’s prose delicate , wry  but sometimes bawdy and full of cracking one-liners . It is a homage at times to Joyce.   Phillip  Roth called her  “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.