MILLICENT BELL
killers ... The women in their cardigans and garish frocks, their differ–
ent lollipings of perfume and hairspray, sit stiffly, terrified of her.
613
Mary can tell her secret to no one-not to the sentimental nuns in the
convent school and not even to her best friend, Tara, who has been read–
ing a secretly purchased sex manual and tries to start her sexual life by
puncturing her own hymen in advance. Mary's mother, just then, falls ill
and dies, and left alone with her father she is raped by him again. When
she tells him of her pregnancy, he denies his responsibility, then tries to
ram her with a broom handle. As if this is not enough, O'Brien adds a
gratituous horror: a passing stranger grabs Mary in a field one day and
forces her to perform oral sex.
What help she finds at first is not effectual. Mter her father's second
attack she runs away to Galway and is sheltered by a young street musician
until someone from her village recognizes her and she is brought back.
She tries to drown herself, is rescued by the local "countess"-a well-to–
do woman who takes her off to London to an abortion clinic-but their
flight is discovered and she is sent back to Dublin, a "ward of the court"
virtually imprisoned while her trial is prepared. Those "defenders" of
Mary's who want to save her by denying her the freedom to determine her
own life now ring about her in a sort of black-comic dance of pious solic–
itude and barely governed rage. Worthy of caricature by Goya are the five
Irish judges who will act in the case of the "little slut about to pour piss
on the nation's breast." The pair of lawyers who undertake to defend her
on her own terms are almost stymied because she will not accuse her
father.
O'Brien's Mary is excessively mute and passive as a novelistic center,
perhaps. But the rapist father is a triumph of expressive characterization.
Whining, wily, self-excusing, James MacNamara is a repulsive yet weirdly
engaging personality. A latent physical tenderness comes out in his rela–
tionship with animals. As his daughter is a "country girl" responsive to the
"young shoots surgent in the sun, flowers and flowering weed in full
regalia, a carnival sight" so this rural horse trader shows another side when
he helps a mare to foal. "With a taut and terrible delicacy, as if it is a child
that he is assisting into the world, he puts his hand inside again, using his
palm then as a font, for the foal to put its chin on, and with his two fingers
he tries to keep the nostrils open, saying the words, the same animal words,
a Morse." And Mary thinks, vainly, that if only "she can be truly a child
and make her needs known, he can feel as a father."
Topical, too, though reminiscent not of one but of a thousand current
headlines, is Frederick Busch's novel about a man who is moved to find,
