In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve been thinking about my favourite Irish writer, Edna O’Brien, and just how influential she was to me when I was a ‘formative’ (i.e.: terribly young and earnest) writer. I was first introduced to her as a teenager and fell in love with her lyrical, stream-of-consciousness approach to writing. Much of her work inspired my own (far less stellar) writing attempts. She was also so quintessentially Irish, that her work resonated with me at a time when I was particularly fascinated with Irish history (my family has Irish blood and I do believe in a kind of genetic memory that draws me to the places and stories of my ancestors).
In recent years I’ve not read as much of O’Brien’s work and I wonder if that’s partly due to the fact that her books were inextricably tied up with a particular period of my life. I was also
worried that if I re-read her old books now, their impact and beauty would have somehow diminished over the years. I’ve often found that when I go back to a novel which had a huge impact on me at one time in my life, I’m disappointed that it no longer has any such impact at all.
But in anticipation of the day that celebrates all things Irish, I sought out my Edna O’Brien novels on my bookshelves and started leafing once more through their pages. I was relieved to find the lyricism of her writing still drew me in and was delighted to feel the same sense of anticipation, wonder and sadness I used to feel when I read her work. I thought I’d share a short passage – from the opening to her 1994 novel, House of Splendid Isolation:
It’s like no place else in the world. Wild. Wildness. Things find me. I study them. Chards caked with clay. Dark things. Bright things. Stones. Stones with a density and with a transparency. I hear messages. In the wind and in the passing of the wind. Music, not always rousing, not always sad, sonorous at times. Then it dies down. A silence. I say to it, have you gone, have you gone. I hear stories. It could be myself telling them to myself or it could be these murmurs that come out of the earth. The earth so old and haunted, so hungry and replete. It talks. Things past and things yet to be. Battles, more battles, bloodshed, soft mornings, the saunter of beasts and their young. What I want is for all the battles to have been fought and done with. That’s what I pray for when I pray. At times the grass is like a person breathing, a gentle breath, it hushes things.
As O’Brien writes at the very start of this book: History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the sub-soil. Like rain, or hail, or snow, or blood. As a writer of historical fiction, I love being reminded of this from a wonderful writer who captures the essence of place, history, and emotion, so beautifully.
So do you have a favorite Irish writer, and if so, what is it about their work you find so compelling? Or, if you aren’t as into Irish history as I am, which writer captures for you the stories of your ancestors?