The good …

Edna O’Brien would obviously never write a typical Irish ‘misery memoir’, though she has experienced more misery than is quite fair, even to the point of planning suicide. Country Girl is an emotional roller-coaster of a book, beginning with two disturbing dreams of her old home, setting the elegiac tone.

Family life was a ‘ragbag of anecdote, hearsay, allegory and consternation’ in a large two-storey stone house among fields in Co Clare, every room and every object in which is summoned up on the page. Father had been prosperous, but was so no longer, and he drank. Mother, whose ways and sayings are recalled as if yesterday, was of poorer country stock and fervently devout. Rosaries, rituals, holy pictures and stories of saints and the fires of Hell, not to mention mother’s dominant personality, filled and fuelled the imagination of the susceptible child, who was already scribbling stories. Her convent education gave her Latin and Shakespeare, and her first experience of being in love — with ‘my nun’.

When she came across a copy of the sensational Victorian novel East Lynne, she discovered that ecstasy and terror were to be found in the intensities of romantic love. She takes two-and-a-half precious pages to recount the plot of the book: it was that important, though not so important as Anna Karenina was to be. Later she read everything she could lay her hands on. Her literary heroes remain Joyce and Beckett.

Mostly the writing here is top-grade classic O’Brien, flowing along like the Liffey in spate and then astonishing the reader with an unexpected word or phrase which turns a sentence to gold. There is something precarious about this, as if she herself may not know where or why or when the golden bits erupt.