HAUNTING REFRAIN OF A LOVELY, LONELY VOICE

Edna O'Brien was born on the Ides of December.

Her landmark novel, THE COUNTRY GIRLS, turns fifty this year. And most reading this will frown, "Edna who?"

But not me. I am the Champion of Lost Voices, Lost Causes ... the ones that are the most important to hold close to your heart.

"For her style and her unrivalled insight into relationships — among contemporary writers," says the New York Times, "she is the major cardiologist of broken hearts.

O’Brien has won virtually every literary prize Ireland has to offer, but THE COUNTRY GIRLS and other earlier books provoked outrage at home when they first appeared.

The two, opposite sisters in THE COUNTRY GIRLS

reflect O’Brien’s ambivalent relationship with her upbringing in rural County Clare.

In a 2008 newspaper article she recalls that she wrote the book while living in London in three weeks

and in an outpouring of love-hate for “the country I had left and wanted to leave, but now grieved for, with an inexplicable sorrow”:

"Images of roads and ditches and bog and bog lake assailed me,

as did the voice of my mother, tender or chastising, and even her cough when she lay down at night.

In the fields outside, the lonely plaint of cattle, and dogs barking, as I believed, at ghosts. All the people I had encountered kept re-emerging with a vividness:

Hickey our workman, whom I loved;

my father, whom I feared;

a travelling salesman by the name of Sacco, who sold spectacles.

There was no library in the local town and hence no books.

One copy of Rebecca had reached us and pages were passed from one woman to the next, though alas not consecutively."

The novel’s irreligion, sexual frankness and social criticism

provoked some in Ireland to book-burnings and hate mail,

and even O’Brien’s mother censored it, in country fashion.

“She erased with black ink any of the offending words,” recalls the author, “and the book was put in a bolster case and placed in an outhouse.”

The reception given THE COUNTRY GIRLS and other novels is reflected in O’Brien’s 1976 memoir, MOTHER IRELAND,

which is a double tale told in a double tone.

The book interweaves the author’s recollections of her youth and exodus with her profile of the country and its people,

and though much of it is fond and empathetic, it has this quotation from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies as its final note :

"Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody.

I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come."

Edna's voice whispers in haunting and lovely images, evoking a yearning within all of us to have the best of home again, though mourning the wounds of our childhood.
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Speaking of childhood, this tune was sung to me by my own mother as I lay coughing in the darkness as the winter snows cut off the power and my breath with double pneumonia. Some nights I can hear her still.