The opening sentence of Girl, Edna O’Brien’s last novel is, I think, unforgettable: “I was a girl once, but not any more...” And from there O’Brien, who died on Saturday, takes the reader into the unimaginable horror of the abduction and rape of the Chibok schoolgirls by the Islamist group, Boko Haram.
O’Brien had read about a young girl found in the forest who had escaped with her rape-baby but lost her mind. Her pity fired, O’Brien set off to Nigeria with £15,000 in cash stuffed about her, to talk to the girl survivors and visit the displaced persons’ camps. She came back with boxes and boxes of notes to turn into that spare novel back home.
In other words, Edna O’Brien was, then 88, the kind of novelist for whom writing was graft, a craft, something to be laboured over. Not all her novels were so painfully researched, but there was more to her than empathy and lyricism. Her first novel, The Country Girls, was famously written in three weeks, as if, she said, she were possessed. But the others were worked on. That’s the first lesson from O’Brien; writing takes effort.
Edna O’Brien was the kind of novelist for whom writing was graft, a craft, something to be laboured over
The other lesson was that she reinvented herself as the best writers do. She acquired instant notoriety with one kind of novel, roughly parodied as Irish convent girls up for sex and ended wrestling with some uncomfortable truths about present realities. Much of the stuff in Ireland about her now, from the president down, is unmistakably self-congratulatory — haven’t we changed from the bad old days of Catholic Ireland!
But there wasn’t quite the same gush about her novel, In the Forest, about a real-life triple murder of a young mother, her little boy and a local priest. That confronted Ireland with a rather different image of itself and it didn’t like it much. There’s a lot about modern Ireland, much divided on immigration, which calls for her unsparing gaze now.
But she was as a novelist a Londoner, which has always accommodated the Irish with generosity. I met her at a party where I too fell for, her compelling gaze, her charm. I asked her about her convent — “it was awash with hormones,” she said. Having her novels banned in Ireland did her no harm here. She gave lots back to London; she ornamented parties as well as literary life.
She was brave in the culture wars. When critics said that an outsider shouldn’t write about the Chibok girls, she wrote: “I do not subscribe to that devious form of censorship. Theme and territory belong to all who aspire to tell it.” Thank you, Edna. You’ll be missed.
