A CONVERSATION with Edna O'Brien swings between two co-ordinates: those experiences that he describes with a shudder as "nightmare, nightmare", or those that get the ringing, smiling endorsement of "a humdinger". Everything is heightened, intensified and self-consciously theatrical, and sitting in her study in all the stickiness of a London summer afternoon, there is a sense of trying to share a fervid scene in a play with the leading lady, who has also written the script.
The first reviews of her new novel, Down "By The River, and the recent flurry of press coverage, are the biggest "nightmare", and she is more anxious about criticism than one might expect over 30 years of often vituperative dissection of her work, character and private life have not hardened her to it. She seems both vulnerable and defensive.
Her last novel, House Of Splendid Isolation, marked an expansion from the traditional O'Brien terrain of doomed love affairs and melancholy, disappointed women, into politics and history. The new book continues this outward movement, embracing the politics and hysteria of the pro and anti-abortion lobbies, as they argue over the ethics of allowing a 14-year-old rape victim to have an abortion.
Obviously, this echoes the X case of four years ago, although the novel heightens the tragedy by the fact that it is the girl's father who is responsible for the pregnancy, and the abuse has taken place over many years. Set in the west of Ireland, it is a novel full of violence, of violation, fear, brutality and ignorance, of suicide and attempted suicide and a painful miscarriage.
"I have wanted to write a book about incest for a long time," O'Brien says. "Hidden lives, the things that are not spoken of, interest me - they always have. Like everybody else, I was shocked by the X case, by the way a life, a young, private and, yes, unschooled life, can be taken over by all sorts of voices, warring voices, so that the person at the centre gets forgotten.
"It is not only dealing with the X case; there are Y cases and Z cases, as you well know, as everyone in Ireland knows, and there is that inherited mantle of guilt that we have, as a legacy of the Catholic church, even if we are unbelievers.
"There is no question of my just plucking this story from the newspapers, " she says, suddenly prickly. "If I had, it would not have any emotional truth, no catharsis. I'm not cashing in on this in any sensationalist way. Believe me, if I wanted to be sensationalist, I could do so a lot more ... flagrantly ..." and her head is tossed back with a flaring of nostrils and a widening of those huge eyes.
In preparation for Down By The River, which took three years to write, O'Brien spent time in Ireland, attending anti-abortion rallies and talking to barristers. "I sat in the Four Courts, hour after hour - often without being able to hear a word - doing what is grandiloquently known as research. I watched those lawyers move with an innate self-importance." This is volunteered to preempt the suggestion that she is out of touch with contemporary Ireland.
"I am tired of being told that I don't know anything about Ireland; I know my Ireland," she says emphatically. "That is not to say that it is the same as your's, or some other writer's. I know those roads and fields and tractors, every last bit of them. I know them psychically, physically, geographically, spiritually. They have seeped into my creativity, and believe me, that does not make for harmonious living."
She will concede, however, that she is not familiar with urban life in this country. "I don't know Dublin. I don't write about the city; it has no emotional charge for me. The landscape and the story have to merge for, me, and I have total visual recall of the details of place."
If hers is an Ireland that many people here can't recognise, or find anachronistic, that is not, she insists, because she is writing with an English or American audience in, mind. "To think of an audience, any audience, would paralyse me, it would be complete death. It is so difficult just to get those words into sequence, to keep doing it and redoing it until it is right, to face what Kierkegaard called the fear and trembling of the creative act, that an audience would be unthinkable - oh, nightmare, nightmare."
Certainly House Of Splendid Isolotion, which followed the fortunes of a fugitive republican terrorist, did not endear her to the English reading public, but there are ways of writing about Ireland for a foreign audience that are less obvious than simply taking one political line or another. There is a mythopoeic romanticism, a feyness and melodrama about O'Brien's work that can stick in the throat.
"Look, I have a very complicated relationship with my country, and the pulse of it is what I apply myself to," she says, rising slowly from the pile of cushions. "Young people, of course, will want to deny that the things I'm writing about are happening. When you're young, you think who wants this sordid, morbid stuff. But it exists, alongside what is vivid, vibrant and creative. There are crevices and convolutions, there are paradoxes and all those complexities.
And in that last phrase, which ends, in her mind and mine, with Yeats's: " ... of mire and blood", there is the key to O'Brien's whole style and self-dramatisation: her rhetoric and imagery is entirely Yeatsian, as is her conception of the creative process. When she says, later, that she has just finished writing a screenplay for a film about Maud Gonne, and "the parabola of her love affairs", it's hard to suppress the thought that no-one could play the role better than O'Brien herself.
"IRISH people are very passionate," she continues, "in the lies they tell and the truth they tell. So they are also passionate in their denial of what they know to be happening under their noses.
The change in direction in her writing, from the evocation of individual female experience - the solipsism and narcissism, the erotic obsessions and emotional neediness - which were her themes from The Country Girls onwards, to the broader social and political canvas of the most recent novels, is something that she attributes to a growth of confidence.
"I'm more concerned with the world around me now, less afraid. I was afraid when I wrote the Country Girls. I now believe that it is a great privilege for a writer to be able to take any theme in the world."
What brought about the new confidence is something she is reluctant to pin down, but it coincided with a period of psychotherapy, which she found enormously valuable. "I have been helped and, well, excavated, by a man who was a genius for me. He gave me something that every child wants from his parents, and usually doesn't get: he saw into me completely, in an intuitive way.
It is not entirely coincidental, therefore, that in tandem with the intrusion of the wider world came the more frequent, and altered, depiction of male characters in her books. "Yes, I'm now writing about men with more sympathy, I'm less frightened of them. I see now that men are as capable of fear and need and vulnerability as women. But I used not think that. The men in my hooks were either Heathcliffs or bishops, I know, but if people complain about that, I say that we are all the result of our own personal histories. I love men more now and fear them less.
"Before, my books were depictions of women at different moments of their history. But each book is a preparation for the next and I had to do that to get to where I am now. And, having widened the horizons, I do not want to narrow them again."
Finding a subject for her next novel is already preoccupying her. Writing is an insane impulse, a compulsion. If I could not write, if I were forbidden, I would go mad.
Oh nightmare. As well as what I live by, it is my greatest friend. Each time I deliver a manuscript I'm terrified that it's no good, but there's also a tremendous sense of strength there's a struggle between you and it and you know that it's totally within your power to bring it off. And that, as Hemingway said, is a damn fine thing.
Less fine, clearly, as she unscrolls a list of reading engagements with a pained expression, are the demands made on authors to publicise their work. "Sometimes, I do enjoy readings. The big one in Paris recently was a humdinger, but you know I have requirements in readings, as in life, that are seldom met." Smiling to herself, she launches into an anecdote about her school days in the convent in Loughrea, where once she was called upon to play Our Lady of Fatima in a tableau, and, as she stood with eyes downcast on a shrine of butter boxes, the support collapsed and she fell.
That story is absolutely perfect, of course, for the best-selling, exiled novelist who gave the voice to Irish female sexuality, whose books were denounced as scandalous by parish priests but were sold in the corner shops of every country town. The toppled madonna, the iconoclast. She grins at me, triumphant, and it's a relief to realise, at last, that she doesn't take herself entirely seriously. all the time.
Then it's down the stairs and gracious smiles and directions to the tube station. "Turn left here and imagine you are a bird and fly up, up, over the rooftops In a flutter of chiffon her arm soars and it's a valediction. Bravo, Edna.