EDNA O'BRIEN has always been at her best writing about the helplessness of children caught in the crossfire of adult unreason, young girls like Meg in her short story A Demon, or Creena in A Pagan Place. In her new novel, the theme of parental rape makes for a poignant study of fourteen year old Mary MacNamara, who is both a judgment on her father and his powerless victim, when she becomes pregnant with his child.
The story has the dense and suffocating atmosphere of a fairy tale, with the child under a wicked enchantment, from which she tries to escape by running through a dark wood full of horrors. It is exquisitely written, with glowing descriptions of the natural world; the prose has an almost gothic quality. "She would go dawn into the ladies and would look and she would keep looking and she would keep willing it, keep asking it and it would come, one berry of red on a mesh of hair, like a holly berry, heraldic."
Short, stark chapters have headings like "Strawberry" and "A Pet", such as you might find in a children's book. But the episode headed "Broomstick" is not a tale of witches, but of her father attacking her with a splintered broomstick to "defuck that bastard out of her". There is no pity for Mary. She is an unloving daughter, an insolent brat besmirching the nation's good reputation, a sullied woman putting her life before that of an unborn innocent.
Allegedly inspired by the "X" case, this is in fact a very different story, of incest and rural secrecy but there are parallels in the study of the least attractive face of modern Ireland. Mountainy men live with a portrait of the Pope presiding over the squalor of the kitchen and a nicotine stained mobile phone in the drawer. Politicians with secret sex lives mouth public pieties. The legal fraternity swap men's stories over a stodgy lunch before getting down to the business of the day: "Some little slut about to pour piss on the nation's breast." Least appealing are the well heeled holy women virtually scavenging for foetuses to save so that their protection of the unborn becomes a predatory pursuit of the pregnant.
O'Brien examines not just the helplessness of the abused, but the legacy of guilt passed on to the victim. "What would your mother say . . . dirty little thing," her father laughs. Overwhelmed by shame, Mary tells no one, but her very secrecy informs. "Oh, Mary . . . We have to do something . Fast," says her mother's friend, Betty. "What can we do . . . fast . . . and the face reflected in the mirror is not that of a little girl at all, but an animal, animal eyes staring out from the noose of an iron trap." When she runs away and is brought back by police, "she looks at the woman guard, makes a sign, which is then extinguished, and there passes between them a look of fumbling and hopeless baulk".
The story develops the momentum of a thriller. The girl's hopeless flight from her own body is reminiscent of Felicia in William Trevor's Felicia's Journey. But Mary MacNamara is not dumb and passive like Felicia. She is an intelligent child brought to premature maturity not by pregnancy but by acquaintance with the adult world's conspiracy to preserve appearances.
This is a departure for O'Brien from recent novels such as The High Road and Time and Tide, in which the author's shrewd eye yielded to middle aged introspection. Down the River is a measure and powerful work. Her study of the snivelling brute of a father is implacable and compassionate. A magnificent chapter describes the difficult birth of a foal, when Mary first witnesses tenderness in her father. Ignorant, sentimental and childish, he is incapable of remorse but only of self pity, and confronts the truth like a man awakening from a dream and finding the monster that he is dreamed, agape, beside him on the pillow".
When O'Brien wrote A Pagan Place there was uproar at her suggestion of clerical child abuse. This novel will almost certainly provoke a fresh outcry among those who love to bask in the nation's wholesome image, hut for anyone who can stand its painful truths this is a powerful and thought provoking study of not one but many child abusers. And in spite of the ugly and agonising theme, it is a novel of delicacy and beauty.