Edna O'Brien's Two Worlds

...This is interesting, yet a bit too pat to be wholly effective...

...In "Irish Revel" the villagers—and notably Brogan,acustoms official who wins the sweepstakes and must have a party to celebrate at the Commercial Hotel where he spends Monday to Friday (returning to his wife on weekends) —strike me as caricaturish, almost stock Irish, an easiness that eventually disappears...

...What is especially appealing about the tales of Western Ireland, though, is their quality of abundance...

...The title of the collection is puzzling...

...Again, in the later stories, after the "they" becomes the "we" of O'Brien's own family, she is less absolute and more alert to the presence and nuance of feeling, however deeply hidden beneath rock-like layers of customary reticence...

...if at home, they are violent, subject to fits of insane rage...

...and an impressive understanding of her frequently odd, wayward characters that does not operate too quickly or completely...

...The mature awareness presiding over O'Brien's narratives typically dispels illusions...

...Without any prettying or falsifying, the most impoverished surroundings are shown to accommodate some deep creature comfort, if only in the form of warm soda bread " dolloped with butter and greengage jam...

...Unlike, say, Hemingway's Basques, they do not offer an idealized refuge from contemporary woes...

...a seemingly effortless, unobtrusive lyricism...

...It has one basic source: Both the child and the mother are deprived of the love of the father...

...Perhaps the difference derives from portraying a way of life and portraying a life style...

...But we also learn that Edna O'Brien's heart is far from a fanatic's...

...Fathers in these stories tend to disappear, to go off on a "batter"—an endless drinking spell...

...When O'Brien turns from constrained, personalist Western Ireland to an urban culture of drifting hedonists, in which no one is known to anyone else —"Nobody ever says where we come from or what haunts us" she remarks of her companions in this world—something of her sureness of touch is lost...

...The farms, at least the more prosperous ones, are mechanized...

...But O'Brien is careful to alternate the vividness of the child's perceptions with hard-won adult knowledge of human motives and situations...

...Animals, who share so many aspects of this life, participate as well in its moments of satiety: O'Brien describes a "particularly naughty pig" who "stole into the house one time and lapped up the bowls of cream and then lay down on the floor, snoring and belching like a drunken man...

...It is taken from Yeats' poem "Remorse for Intemperate Speech," whose final stanza reads: Out of Ireland have we come...

...Ireland's civil strife is reported with a casualness that serves to indicate how much a condition of everyday existence it is even in the green, peaceful-seeming valleys...

...O'Brien's imagination of society in West Ireland—including the love between men and women this society can admit, and some it can't—is the product of care and thought...

...Men work in quarries, drive trucks or scheme to market rust-proofing compounds...

...Narrated in the third person, the tale lacks the emotional depths that are uncovered once the author begins to put herself in the scene, as she does in eight of the first nine stories here (initially issued in 1981 as a slim volume entitled Returning...

...a simple but strong narrative sense...

...In the urban pieces there is a rather obsessive concentration on affairs with a succession of sleek married men...

...The women clumsily but assiduously follow city fashions...

...To be sure, writing about one's childhood or employing the first person does not guarantee triumphs of memory and imagination...

...The other half concern the modern life of restless, for the most part affluent, cosmopolites free from yesterday's moral and sexual constraints...

...it is generous, and it is large...

...The effect is reminiscent of several stories in Joyce's Dub-liners, or the celebrated opening of A Portrait of the A rtistAsA Young Man, mixing baby tuckoo's perceptions of his universe with Joyce's assessment of it...

...The feeling of abundance also arises from the linguistic fecundity of the Irish, with their ample stock of expressive idiom...

...and of course from the author's Joycean ear, her capacity to capture all that quotidian poetry...

...In "The Connor Girls" it enables us to see through the allure of a well-to-do Protestant household that for the child seems an "exalted world...

...This strikes me as too harsh and gloomy to fully apply...

...Irish Revel," a relatively early story published in the 1968 book The Love Object, contrasts the purity of Mary, a shy young girl from a "moun-tainy farm," with the lechers and carousing drunks who live in the village below her remote little white-washed house on a hill...

...Yet while the two worlds she presents are very different, O' Brien' s farmers and villagers live as fully, if often incomprehendingly, in a recognizable present as do her London sophisticates...

...In "Savages" it shows how the most brutal intolerance and cruelty can have the sanction of church and respectable society...

...Great hatred there may be in Ireland, and little room, as we learn from these stories...

...She can note in passing the "cream blooms" of the horse chestnut tree "hung like candles merely waiting to be lit...

...As Philip Roth observes in his Foreword, "The sensibility is on two levels and shuttles back and forth, combining the innocence of childhood with the scars of maturity...

...Or she can encompass the whole of life in a single spare sentence: "Nothing happened except the land was plowed, the crops were put down, there was a harvest, a threshing, then geese were sent to feast on the stubble, and soon the land was bare again...

...Neither the same care nor the same thought seems to have gone into her investigations of people who are themselves careless and thoughtless...

...Granted, her gifts are such that she can write affectingly about the progress and disappointments of love no matter where these transpire—in orchards or fields, London flats or posh resorts...

...Although the stories have an undeniable pathos that will appeal to a certain kind of female grievance, their characters, particularly the males, are hollow, interchangeable partners...

...The affairs always begin deliciously and end miserably, possibly because the married men ultimately appear to fill the role of the absent father...

...O' Brien's own linguistic power is often quite breathtaking, too...

...Nor are terrorist violence and death lacking...

...I carry from my mother's womb A fanatic heart...

...Thus the writer observes of Mary's people that "they were hard...

...Reviewed by Oliver Conant Contributor, "Contact II," "American Book Review" Half the stories in this collection by the gifted Irish writer Edna O' Brien are about the hard agricultural life and predominantly primitive, tradition-bound people in Western Ireland...

...More crucially, the writer's mature awareness can attempt to come to terms with the very often terrible pain of her upbringing, pain the child can respond to only with great gusts of feeling, tantrums, bewilderment, or small rituals of self-punishment...

...Great hatred, little room, Maimed us at the start...

...To survive, emotionally and otherwise, mother and daughter become for a time a world unto themselves, as they do in the harrowing "A Rose in the Heart of New York...

...and it was only when someone died that they could give in to sentiment and crying...

...In "The Doll" it clarifies what to the child is the inexplicable meanness of a teacher who confiscates a treasured doll: "She kept the doll out of perversity, out of pique and jealousy...

...A related failing is a tendency to generalize in a distancing and distorting manner...

...The resources O'Brien brings to her representation of rural life include an acute sensitivity to the beauties of the lakes, mountains and flora of Western Ireland...

...Since A Fanatic Heart consists of selected stories, the reader is able to glimpse O'Brien's developing ability, over roughly two decades, to render what she calls "her own part of the world...

...And in "Sister Ismelda," an evocative tale of a convent school—somewhat the equivalent of Stephen Dedalus' Clongowes— it demonstrates how religious fervor can stultify youth and instinct...

...In addition, the settings are barely detailed, an absence I find curious and frustrating in a writer otherwise so handsomely possessed of a sense of place...