Fiction: Edna O'Brien has said about this disconcerting and skilfully made book that she chose to write the story as fiction rather than as a memoir because "fiction allows for imagination, the gamut of experience, plight, loss, entanglements, etc." It is an avowal that invites questions, not all of them aesthetic. That "etc" covers a multitude.
Only in fiction can the gamut of experience be approached with imagination? In recent years such books as Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People have extended the scope of traditional autobiography, in part by employing a novelist's strategies. Bob Dylan's magnificent Chronicles, eschewing stodgy chronology, offers itself as a mosaic of scenes from a life. And John McGahern's Memoir, to take another luminous example, succeeds because of the intensity with which it is imagined. Perhaps all novelists are writing about themselves, but one suspects that the decision for fiction, when writing autobiography, can have as much to do with protectiveness as style.
The Light of Evening is the story of two women - more accurately, of three, for its central presence, Dilly (based on O'Brien's mother), appears both as young emigrant to America and as elderly patient in a Dublin hospital nearing the end of her life. It is a brave organisational device, this contrapuntal structure, since it destabilises easy assumptions about what kind of story is being told.
The New York sequences are lively and detailed. "Noise poured out of the saloon and boys in long overalls were running hither and thither to deliver jugs of foaming beer and in an alley children in rags and tatters were chasing young pigs with cabbage stalks." The cliches of immigrant America are nicely subverted by a portrayal of the new country as rambunctiously exciting. An attractive humour sophisticates the texture. Young Dilly, a servant, is told by an American priest that she won't feel lonely here in Brooklyn because she will be able to hear the bleat of sheep from a local park.
No dates are given but from textual reference we know that these events are taking place in the early 1920s. Back home in Ireland, war is raging; Dilly's brother is killed by British soldiers. America, for the immigrant, is a world apart, but the absence of the motherland is so sharp that it becomes a kind of presence.
Many years later, Dilly's daughter, Eleanora, a novelist who scandalously takes up with an unsuitable man, becomes the focus of the narrative. Letters and a journal are exchanged between mother and daughter. A powerful empathy is at work in these sequences; more powerful because of a sense of the ability of words to conceal or evade. Movingly, the act of writing itself becomes a sort of communion. As such, The Light of Evening joins the corpus of Irish literary texts about how family members recollect the same events in jarringly different ways. The problem is not only what happened, but how what happened is remembered. This is a novel of contested versions and it draws much of its force from that.
It is also a story about the love of reading. Samuel Richardson, the Brontës, John Clare, Virginia Woolf, Dean Swift and Wordsworth are among the figures receiving homage but Joyce is the deity glimpsed most frequently in the background. This novel even contains a strikingly written Christmas dinner scene, complete with Irish political quarrel, that recalls, and perhaps comments on, that unforgettable sequence in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And, like Joyce's great overture - itself, in one sense, a fictionalised memoir - The Light of Evening is partially an account of the development of a writer who sees exile as emblematic of freedom. As such, difficult questions are implied by its preoccupations. How does the immigrant impatriate when the pull of home is so unrelenting? What would have happened had Dilly remained in America instead of coming back to the family homestead at Rusheen? Was her return a failure or an act of heroic faith? Are the nets of family and nation the ones to avoid, or do subtler traps lurk in exile?
The sentences are often very long, full of punchy staccato images, which give urgency to the spirited and colourful prose. Readers familiar with O'Brien's speaking voice will find themselves hearing it as they progress through the book. Occasionally suspension of disbelief is mildly assailed by the realisation that Eleanora, a radiantly complex character, is of course a version of O'Brien herself, and is clearly intended to be so. Thus the book attempts gamely to have it several ways: fiction, chronicle, roman à clef. The writing is so vigorous that categories don't always matter. O'Brien is as committed as ever to her characters and is too accomplished a storyteller to stand in their way. And all self-portraits are subjective - that is why they interest us. But having to ask what exactly you are reading is sometimes a disruption. You wonder who is being shielded, and from what.
Some will read this book playing a literary version of spot-the-ball, comparing O'Brien's narrative with other versions of her marriage that have appeared. That would be to miss the point of a novel that will sound echoes to anyone who has ever been unlucky in love. The picture of Eleanora's sundering relationship, its jealousies, betrayals and attempted recoveries, is painful and memorable. Her husband Hermann, himself a writer, is drawn as a controlling, damaged man, the marriage as a battlefield of competing responsibilities. Eleanora's literary work, or rather her success in the world of publishing, quickly becomes a threat to him. Oscillating between ridiculing her writing ("skittish, sentimental rubbish") and claiming he wrote it himself, Hermann becomes imprisoned by his own limitations. The consequences are written unflinchingly, making this a courageous as well as an artful book. It is also a poignant one, whatever its genre, and its shifting, somewhat elusive stance.
Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea is published by Vintage. His next novel Redemption Falls will be published next spring
The Light of Evening By Edna O'Brien Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 384pp. £14.99