The Irish lodestar

In exile, exploring love and longing

O’Brien had moved to London, self-exiled from Ireland just like her idols Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Writers such as John McGahern, a fabulous prose stylist, remained in Ireland and wrote novels like The Dark and The Pornographer, which had sexuality as their underlying theme, but it was comparatively easier for men to stay on in Ireland and pursue their art than for women. Because a woman writing about subjects playing fast and loose with morals could trigger an upheaval in a closed and Catholic society like Ireland’s. “You know something? You're Irish, you're good-looking and a woman, you're a writer. . .you're going to have a very hard time,” the American writer Saul Bellow had told her.

O’Brien kept writing in London about the subject she cherished the most—the longing of women and the blooming of their desires in bodies that operated in a space dominated by men. Can we call it a cry for freedom? Not freedom from chains, but from a constricted interiority that at times was baffling for a woman struggling to survive in the city of London. O'Brien once recalled a conversation she had with American writer Norman Mailer, who had found the interiority of her books a bit heavy and had offered to put her straight.

Mailer: “You're a good writer, but you know what's wrong with you?"

O’Brien: “Oh, great. Tell me.”

Mailer: “You're too interior.”

O’Brien: “Norman, I'll strike a bargain with you: You're exterior and I'm interior. Why don't we, uh, combine it?"

The roaring sixties was a time of tumult and turbulence. O’Brien, who by then had moved away from her husband, had her string of affairs and partied hard with storied names of that generation. Paul McCartney sang to her children and Marlon Brando visited and there was an LSD episode with the psychoanalyst RD Laing. Philip Roth, staying in London with actor Claire Bloom, was her friend and so were literary superstars like Mailer and Bellow. She was accused of flaunting herself, her brazenness called out.

Journeying with empathy

In 2019, her last novel Girl came out. Set in Africa, it is about a girl who is abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Before the novel, O’Brien had made two research trips to Africa in her mid-80s, the intrepid writer in her still seeking the truth, still trying to find out how a female body reacts when it is assaulted and abducted.

The American novelist Richard Ford called the novel a work of “profound empathy and grace”. And it was widely praised even in these wokeish times when cultural spaces are ferociously guarded. Some years before, in his senescence, the cantankerous writer VS Naipaul had also travelled to Africa to write his last book, The Masque of Africa. Naipaul’s work, though packed with a variety of detail, was excoriated for its inauthenticity. That makes the achievement of O’Brien — a white and a woman — all the more remarkable.

“Let’s say there will always be literature because the imagination is boundless. We just need to care more for the imagination than for the trivia and the commerce of life. Literature is the next best thing to God,” she once said.

In her late age, with Girl, O’Brien had made her style spare, away from the lyricism of her earlier novels. In the 70s, she had moved towards experimentation, writing A Pagan Place in the second person singular and Night as one long monologue.

Asked about her writing style, O’Brien told Paris Review: “Discipline doesn’t come into it. It is what one has to do. The impulse is stronger than anything. I don’t like too much social life anyway. It is gossip and bad white wine. It’s a waste. Writing is like carrying a foetus. I get up in the morning, have a cup of tea, and come into this room to work.”

Back to Ireland

In the 90s, for the first time, O’Brien tackled Irish Troubles in House of Splendid Isolation and then went on to explore big social and political changes that her country was witnessing. Down By The River was the story of a teenaged rape victim and In The Forest dealt with a grisly triple murder.

The Irish essayist and intellectual Fintan O’Toole, writing about the horrible event and O’Brien’s novelistic rendering of it, was livid: “There is simply no artistic need for so close an intrusion into other people’s grief.”

But it is precisely this kind of writing — a reckoning with people’s turbulent pasts, with a nation’s horrid pasts — that must have given the courage to writers like Claire Keegan, whose book Small Things Like These is about the church’s silence and engagement running Magdalene Laundries, institutions for so-called “fallen women” of the society. In 1993, unmarked graves of scores of women were uncovered in the convent grounds of these laundries.

When her friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died, O’Brien wrote: “Life gave her diamonds as big as the Ritz, but she was also the butt of cruelty and envy. As she once advised me, the only weapon is to ignore it. Distance and distancing were central to her, not only from others but from huge parts of herself. It was what gave her that inexplicable aura.” Poignant words that, after her death, can also be about O’Brien herself.

The indomitable spirit and fearlessness of younger women writers such as Sally Rooney and Eimear McBride and Claire Keegan would not have been possible if O’Brien, the country girl, had not paved the way.

“I want to go out as someone who kept to the truth,” she said when her writing career was coming to a close. And that’s how she went, bequeathing her truth-seeking abilities to that generation that came after her.