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PARTISAN REVIEW
Brookner were a different sort of writer, with more general interests in soci–
ety at large, she might not have composed a stronger novel by seeing her
hero's problems differently than she has. Sarah's heartlessness and anarchy
might be understood as a critique of Alan's exhausted middle-class virtues
of fidelity and prudence. If Brookner were another sort of writer-though
she is a good enough writer in her own way---she might have seen and let
us see something in her hero's personality that suggests a dead end of class
or culture, and the desperation of his sexual obsession as a desire for escape
from these. But that is to do what Henry James warned the critic against
doing-to argue with a writer's postulates, the thing she set out to do which
is not what you might have preferred.
That the novel may exhibit not only personal life but also, often, gener–
al history is a part of its traditional habit. More than ever, today, the
publishing industry seeks--quite opportunistically-to hang a best-seller
onto the caboose of some recent headline (appropriately, the word "novel"
is related to French
nouvelles-which
means "news"). Edna O'Brien's latest
novel bases itself on the notorious 1992 case of a 14-year old Irish girl who
had been raped, became pregnant, and was prevented by the Irish courts
from going to England for an abortion. But this veteran, who has been writ–
ing fiction about her native country since the sixties, is too good a wri ter to
succeed merely by topicality. Her vivid, violent narrative is "sensational" in
joining the reader's senses and sensibilities to those of Mary MacNamara,
who is raped by her father on page 3 and whose travail ends only when she
miscarries at the end of the novel. Mary is a younger sister of those strong–
feeling, innocent, yet intelligently perceiving "country girls" about whom
O'Brien has often written. The novelist's own somewhat Joycean style is a
poetic notation of the life pouring past and through her heroine's con–
sciousness. In that opening scene, as her father presses her down onto a slope
of gorse, we are spared no part ofMary's sense of cataclysm but also are made
to notice, on the ground nearby, "an old Ovaltine tin with a picture of a lady
with a saffron mantilla." Mary's eye, like her creator's, terrifYingly misses
nothing.
What surrounds Mary is a world of brutality and charade. O'Brien intro–
duces the reader early in the novel to a gaggle of small-town anti-abortionists
on the occasion of a visit from a national leader.
Roison is holding up two pictures, two contrasting pictures, a content–
ed baby, curled up in a womb, and a torn baby, its body mangled, pools
of black blood
in
the crevices and in the empty crater of its head. Arms
go up, forearms go up which Roisin pulls aside, forcing them to look,
to witness the butchery done in England and elsewhere by a clique of
