O'Brien Country

SPOTLIGHT

'Countries are always either mothers or fathers," Edna O'Brien once told me, "and Ireland is a mother, though she can be a widow and a gaunt hag." Imagine, then, what such a country might be like as a daddy. That's just what O'Brien does do in her latest novel, Down by the River (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Based loosely but solidly on the celebrated "Miss X" affair (where an underage Irish girl was legally denied the right to travel to England in order to terminate a pregnancy inflicted by the father of a friend), the book makes the girl's father commit the crime. The old sod—by which I mean the country, not the daddy—is a land of ire. But the nation's rage is reserved for the girl herself, when she tries to get an abortion.

You might say that the emerald-eyed Edna O'Brien was born to write this. Her own father— perhaps fortunately—preferred horses and bottles to daughters. She was a young runaway from the dark side of Irish rural life. ("Out in the country things get very murky," says the girl in Down by the River. "I would like to live in a city because if you scream someone can hear you.") And when O'Brien got divorced, extracts from her novels were read aloud in court to prove her unfitness as a mother. Though she's been a Londoner these many years, brightening the metropolitan swim in a dozen ways, it's the lure of magic and tragedy that pulls her back, time and again, across the sea to Ireland.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS