Down by the River. - book reviews

National Catholic Reporter, May 23, 1997 by Michael Lee

DOWN BY THE RIVER By Edna O'Brien Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 256 pages $23 hardback

Five years after the fact, Edna O'Brien has written a novel with strong echoes of the national cri de coeur surrounding a 14-year-old Irish rape victim's appeal of a law that prevented her from traveling to England to end the resulting pregnancy.

But while Down By The River incorporates many of the voices of ideology, theology, and legality that contended for that particular piece of Ireland's oft-shredded soul, readers should not look to the book for commentary on a singular event per se, nor for its author's contribution to the political and moral debates over abortion.

Rather, the book marks the resumption of an ongoing narrative O'Brien began in 1960 with her first novel, The Country Girls. For 37 years she has been writing the story of a "Mother Ireland" that betrays the most basic trusts of its female citizens, forcing them into spiritual, psychological, or (as in O'Brien's own case) actual exile. Down By The River relates that story's darkest chapter.

In fact the phrase "Mother Ireland" (the very title of O'Brien's 1976 collection of autobiographical sketches) is too potentially sentimental in its implications for this latest novel. Philip Roth's remark that O'Brien's Ireland is "more succubus than mother" seems presciently apt of a book in which a young girl is impregnated by her drunken and sell pitying father soon after the girl's mother has died, finally abandoning her to sexual advances that had begun long before t, he mother's death. The novel posits a sinister spirit not only in the father and his acts of sexual abuse, but also in the culture that created him and sees no evil in his denial of reality until long after there is any hope for redemption for his daughter.

The challenge of turning the story of Ireland's "X Case" into a novel must have been a daunting one even for a writer of O'Brien s enormous narrative powers. Consider the problem of the writer: how to portray in a credible way the human identity of the young Mary McNamara, while simultaneously dramatizing and making believable the process by which that very identity is engulfed by "forces" much larger than any individual self?

In her 13 novels and numerous short stories to date, O'Brien has been experimenting with and discovering the narrative techniques most appropriate to expressing individual voices and states of consciousness. In such novels as A Pagan Place, Night, and most recently, House of Splendid Isolation, she has used soliloquy, stream of consciousness and multiple narrators to explore the workings of the memory and the thought processes of self-conscious characters. In doing so she has proven herself a consummate practitioner of the modernist narrative styles invented and worked by the likes of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, all of whom she has acknowledged as influences on her work.

But the material she treats in Down By The River forms her to forgo the expression of individual voice and consciousness. Partially embracing postmodern notions about the de-centered narrative, she offers us here a story whose elements emerge in fits and starts, in discrete bits of narrative information or imagery so concrete, dramatic and immediate that the novel can be said to lack a narrator. This is a story that truly is allowed to tell itself. The outcome is a stunning success, as we see Mary's world and feel her condition with her, and at the same time receive glimpses of the larger worlds of politics, religion and law, of which Mary has virtually no awareness.

With no discernible narrative "voice" organizing the plot and shaping the reader's response to the characters and action, the story unfolds (not exactly seamlessly) over the course of 74 segments which, averaging only two and a half pages in length, are too short to be called chapters. The effect is impressive: A narrative which, even if it lacks the dramatic unity of Greek tragedy, has all its power. We are witness to an inexorable gathering of forces impersonal as fate, as religious zealots, letter-of-the-law legalists, and political pragmatists align to form a wall of opposition to a young girl's instinctive wish to end the growth of a life that she experiences as evil, and that she senses can only destroy her.

In her representation of these forces, O'Brien deliberately resorts to caricature. Reminiscent of the juridical and legal figures sketched by Daumier and Goya, her legalists fall Far short of any abstract ideal of justice. Early in the book we see them as " ... men of bristling goatee beards, men of serious preoccupied countenances ... corporeal figures of knowledge and gravity ... powerful men, men with a swagger, a character personified by the spill of the gown or the angle of a coifed wig, their juniors a few paces behind them laden with briefs and ledgers, the whole paraphernalia of the law in motion "And later, after we hear their mantra ("The unborn shall not be moved from the jurisdiction of the court ... It's written ... Sacrosanct"), we see them as the grotesques they have become: "They walk in silence then, the wind pouching in under their gowns and lifting their hems up so that they look like caricatures of men, arms athwart, groping and gasping for respiration."