A novel by Edna O’Brien
One warm summer evening last year, I picked up a first edition of The Country Girl from the bookshelf in a house where I was staying and I did not leave my place by the window until I had read it from start to finish.
To read the story of Kate and Baba after 30 years was like drinking clear spring water from the wells that abound in Miss O’Brien’s native Clare. Thinking about it now my mind is filled with two strolling girls and apple trees against a country sky.
Miss O’Brien is to be admired and read for the matter of her stories, the lives of women, and the manner in which she tells them.
Her descriptive powers, whether she turns them to an Irish funeral, a garden by a river, or a disastrous sexual encounter, have a clarity and strength that imprint images on your mind. In her depiction of women’s emotions, you recognize immediately the truth of her telling. “Yes,” you say to yourself. “It was like that. That was how it was.” In her latest novel Time and Tide, O’Brien’s country girl has come of age. It is the story of Nell, her unhappy marriage, her attempts to keep her children and the cruelty which she meets in her search for love.
It is a book that celebrates the life of a woman bringing up children on her own — a visit to a street market, a birthday party, a foreign holiday that doesn’t work out — Miss O’Brien charts the voyage of motherhood, in all its joys and sorrows, with delicate precision. No one could call Nell’s life easy, but Miss O’Brien celebrates it. A celebration that has a worm at the heart of the rose since we know from the prologue that tragedy is at hand and will pursue Nell like a vengeful harpy.
At the start of the book Nell is an Irish woman living in London with her husband who has turned from a gentle lover to an ogre. He is cold with his children, over friendly with the au pair, and communicates with his wife cruelly or not at all. His Christmas present to her is a plain postcard that reads “Happy Nothing.” He also pockets all the money she has earned from her writing. Nell leaves him and, after a battle, gains custody of her two sons, Paddy and Tristan.
Her life, like the lives of so many women, is a struggle to combine family life, work, and falling in love. Like most of Miss O’Brien’s heroines, Nell picks disastrous love objects: the Irish Duncan who breaks her heart and the shopkeeper she picks up who installs his girlfriend in Nell’s house. It is only in her love for her children and the knitting together of their family life that Nell has happiness, and that, alas, also has its price.
As Nell is bound to her children, so too is she bound to her mother by hoops of guilt and love. When her marriage fails, Nell writes home. Her mother had never approved of the marriage anyway. The reply arrives.
“Holding her mother’s envelope which was thick and sturdy, she felt a moment of strength, of forgiveness and of a burgeoning hope that life was going to be all right, that the worst had been. Out on the street, she halted by a lamppost to read it leisurely, and also because there were tremors in her heart. That was natural. A fat letter, a wad of words. Warm comforting words. Instead a diatribe. …
“Her mother was asking her to make some vows concerning that future. She was to kneel down as she read the words, kneel down wherever she happened to be, and swear on her oath that she would never touch an alcoholic drink as long as she lived and, more importantly, that she would never have anything to do with any man in body or soul…”
Heedless, clever Nell disobeys her mother and falls for Duncan, the Irish “mesmerizer, drinker and fallen cherub.”
He loves and leaves her, and anyone who has endured that dark night of the soul will understand how she feels:
“I’ll be off’ she said, and with some spurt of courtesy, or perhaps it was relief, he rose to see her out. Her body, aching for him, almost collapsed onto him as they staggered out.
“I’m no use to you, babe,’ he said as he stood in the doorway, with the bruised look of a boxer, saluting passing people with a ‘Hello, goodbye.’
“‘Why didn’t you come,’ she asked, barely restraining herself from touching him, touching his hand, which was inked.
He felt it and moved away, and she saw the goodwill leaking out of him as he mettled himself….
”You’re a cave woman” he said. “Ball and chain, chain and ball.’”
“All women are cave women. They have to be,” she said.”
If you want to take out a Master’s in emotional pain then Miss O’Brien should be required reading. Time and Tide, though, is more than anything, a book about motherhood, and a strong, tough book at that. I loved its ability to make me remember the good things about having children. I loved, too, Miss O’Brien’s stunning images of rural Ireland. It recalled things that I had forgotten but that Miss O’Brien has kept clearly in her writer’s mind.
“She passed the horse chestnut tree where they used to tell her that she had been born and which she preferred to the Blue Room with its damp walls, its slop bucket and the array of holy pictures that were both supplicant and chastising. How beautiful the trees looked with their first coat of russet, but a rich thriving russet that had nothing to do with withering. That would come later. The elderberries were so bright and shiny that they seemed to be saying something. Saying ‘we are elderberries, take note of us.’ The gate needed painting.
“Shavings of dry paint ran along the wrought iron, and each time it was opened or shut, another little consignment fell onto the ground. The car caught up with her, coming at a stately progress. The last thing her eye caught was a bed of nettles so dense and luxuriant that it seemed to rasp with green fire.”
In a piece in Lear’s magazine, Miss O’Brien describes how in her writing, images and the descriptions of things are inextricably connected with a precise emotion. It is her ability to marry image and emotion, to show us vivid painful pictures, that makes her such a superb writer. ‘You can bear it’ the silence said, because that is all there is, this now that then, this present that past, this life this death, and the involuntary shudder that keeps reminding us we are alive.”
Time and Tide is a story that will remain in your head long after you have left Nell alone in her kitchen.⬥
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the September 1992 issue of Irish America.
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