The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1960: Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls

1960 Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls Banned in Ireland on publication and burned in the author’s native County Clare, The Country Girls was followed by the equally provocative The Lonely Girl (1962; reissued as Girl with Green Eyes (1964) – the protagonist of The Country Girls’ eyes are ‘a curious green’). A third novel, Girls in their Married Bliss (1964), follows the girls to England, though their story does not finally conclude until ‘Epilogue’, first published in the 1986 one-volume edition of the trilogy. O’Brien (b. 1930), the author of fourteen novels as well as a large number of shortstory collections and a good deal of non-fiction, has throughout her career returned to the landscape of The Country Girls, critically in A Pagan Place (1970), controversially in In the Forest (2002) and most autobiographically in The Light of Evening (2006). The setting is also central to The Eleventh Summer (1985), the first novel by Edna O’Brien’s son, Carlo Gébler. This novel’s principal events consist of breakdown, rejection, leavetaking and abandonment. Punctuating Caithleen (Cait) Brady’s childhood and adolescence, these discontinuities map onto the known world a private landscape of loss. Her feckless father – who, in his fondness for gambling and drink, is something of a throwback to characters familiar from the Irish novel of an earlier time – acts with a confused and irresponsible disregard for both his property and his family, and eventually has to forego the former and forsake the latter. Cait’s longsuffering mother is accidentally drowned while seeking refuge in her parents’ house from her husband’s excesses. Such a pattern of experiences suggest a rupture between land and people which makes the rural environment a habitat where nature seems incompatible with nurture, thereby complicating the traditional cultural and ideological status of the land as site and source of Irish authenticity. In addition, her family history deprives Cait of such formative influences and valuable developmental resources as a stable family structure, a sense of heritage and of a past that amounts to something, so that conceptions of continuity and direction become unexpectedly problematic. By the time she is fourteen, Cait is effectively on her own and is starting over, although she cannot act as though she is. And in many ways her inevitable 1 cluelessness is a reflection of the largely misguided choices and standards of her immediate community. Even before her mother’s death, Cait has adopted the live-in farmhand , Hickey, to fill a nurturing role. Hickey may not be a model as far as carrying out his agricultural and domestic duties are concerned, but he does – before eventually making the conventional departure of emigrating to England – supply Cait with something of the attention and amusement needed to distract her from family affairs. Attention of a different kind comes from the pawky Jack Holland, a motherdominated shopkeeper and self-styled author with an artificially decorous manner through which he advances his pretensions to sensitivity . But his manner is unable to disguise the grasping mentality by which he eventually secures the Brady land. Jack’s emotional gombeenism blends with the more familiar economic kind to characterise a local status quo to which Hickey is obviously marginal and in which Cait has standing only on the basis of her vulnerability. In addition to her family circumstances, the gauche body language and dreamy disposition typical of teenagers also make Cait aware of being different. This awareness is reinforced by her best friend, Baba Brennan. Brash, in contrast to Cait’s timidity, outpoken while Cait is tongue-tied, crude and pushy where Cait is polite and deferential, Baba is an alternative version of a country girl. Her unconventionality and bumptiousness, her preoccupation with fashion and her insistence in getting her own way make Baba not merely a foil to Cait but a parody of adult independence and maturity. Egotistically, she seems to need to have a ‘right-looking eejit’ (21) such as Cait to play off. But Baba’s egotism is essentially imitative, and if it is the obverse of Cait’s wallflower demeanour, it is also more obviously childish in its attention-seeking clamour. But Baba’s family, too, is unhappy in its own way, as becomes clear when Cait temporarily joins it. Indeed, the Brennan household is a mirror image of the Brady’s, with Baba’s mother restless and extravagant while her veterinarian father is dutiful and patient, even if there does seem something rather incongruous about his...