In the Forest - Softcover

O'Brien, Edna.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0297607383 ISBN 13: 9780297607380

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002

Synopsis

IN THE FOREST, set in the west of Ireland, is the story of a young man who shoots dead three people in a forest glade. The young man, Mich O'Kane, is 'not all there in the head' as one character puts it. By puberty he is already committing petty crimes, ending up in borstal. By the time he is back home he has also served time in a British jail and is an institutionalised criminal. His sexual fantasies - revolving around women in the village - eventually centre on Eily, an artist and single mother, who lives with her son Maddie. One day Mich pounces, and orders Eily to drive them to the woods nearby¿

About this title

Review

Irish novelist Edna O'Brien is again the centre of controversy with her latest novel In the Forest. Forty years ago her first six novels were banned but times have changed.

She also wrote The Country Girls in 1962 and was vilified in Ireland. Taking as her subject matter the actual murders of a young mother, her toddler son and a priest in 1994 in County Clare, she is accused of exploiting grief, of gross insensitivity, of being motivated only by financial gain and of portraying Ireland as timeless and primitive. Her comeback is that "the novelist is the psychic and moral historian of his or her society. So it's about that part of Ireland I know very well...and the darkness that still prevails".

Not surprisingly this "true crime" novel makes for sombre and uncomfortable reading. O'Brien is unquestionably skilled at deploying language to create a highly charged atmosphere: even Cloosh Wood, where much of the action unfolds, takes on its own sinister personality where "the light [becomes] darker and darker into the chamber of non-light".

In tightly written chapters each with a change of narrator--the murderer himself, his sister and father, the murdered young woman, Eily Ryan, her sister, the priest, Father John, neighbours, the police--the effect is of accumulating tension and foreboding, despite our knowing (or because we know?) the terrible outcome. But in making the voices of her numerous characters so fragmented as to suggest a society in the grip of terror, O'Brien fails to make them resonate as individuals, except for the killer, the young psychotic, Mich.

Brutalised at home, abused by his priests and his peers, he becomes the feared "kindershcreck". In his late teens he is released from jail for a string of crimes, and returns to his old turf. Stalked by the brutality of his past, he in turn stalks Eily Ryan, a hippy-ish figure, living with her three-year-old son in a ramshackle cottage that Mich had seen as his own lair. Eily becomes to him "all-mothering, all-sinning. She-devil...Now the ultimate flood of rage that has been waiting is loosed from the wrenched and bloodied sockets of his fucked life as he tears her clothing in an ecstasy of hate, as though tearing limb from limb all womankind". With these terrible deaths and the hunting down of Mich, O'Brien suggests that the crimes are not Mich's alone: fear, bigotry, misogyny, repression and silence permeate the culture. And out of this, such evils come. --Ruth Petrie

Review

Sadly IN THE FOREST didn't make it onto the shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction but just to remind you though of the wonderful reviews the paperback has received so far: 'Edna O'Brien's thoughts have turned to tragedy of late - her startling new translation of Iphigenia premiered at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre recently, while this novel brings ancient Greek resonance to bear on a brutal multiple murder which rocked a small Irish community in 1994....... The manner in which she ushers her sacrificial victims to their fate hasthe harrowing inevitability one might expect from a writer who has spent a lot of time grappling with Aeschylus.THE GUARDIAN 'An absorbing and haunting novel.... never sensationalist, this is a considered study of a particularly shocking case.'THE SUNDAY TIMES 'this often frightening novel has a curiously timeless feel.'THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Despite the controversy that surrounded the publication of this book, O'Brien has created a tense yet senstively-written story, woven delicately with both mythology and modern sociological issues.'THE SUNDAY BUSINESS POST Edna will also be on BBC Radio's BOOKCLUB which will go out later in the year and her PEN lecture on Lampedusa's the Leopard ran

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0297607383
• ISBN 13: 9780297607380
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208