Edna O’Brien and the blurred lines between beauty and barbarism

Deception and reinvention are key to the acclaimed author’s latest novel, an unlikely tale of war crimes and love in rural Ireland.

Irish poet, novelist and playwright Edna O'Brien at her home in Chelsea, London. Eamonn McCabe / Getty Images

Edna O'Brien is among the most prolific – and among the most celebrated – of contemporary Irish writers. Over the course of her career, which spans about 60 years, she has published more than 20 works of fiction, several plays, biographies of James Joyce and Lord Byron, a book about Ireland and a memoir. When she first arrived on the literary scene with the publication of her debut novel, The Country Girls (1960), her success was almost immediately assured: here was a book with such startling candour about the coming of age of young women in a world of self-denial and repression that it was banned by the Irish authorities, burnt and condemned by the church. It swiftly became a bestseller in the UK.

Yet O’Brien is known for more than controversy. Her many admirers include Philip Roth (who, with wearyingly reflexive sexism, regards her as “the most gifted woman now writing in English”), Colum McCann and Andrew O’Hagan, who believes her recreation of the interior lives of women to have had a transformative influence on Irish letters.

The Little Red Chairs, O'Brien's first work of fiction in almost a decade, returns to the theme of private desires and silent dreams; yet it is also concerned with place and politics, with the nature of evil and the possibility of redemption. The novel opens in Ireland with the arrival of a stranger "in a freezing backwater that passes for a town and is named Cloonoila". Our mysterious newcomer hails from Montenegro, refers to himself as Dr Vladimir Dragan (or Vuk), and purports to be a healer and sex therapist. The men of the town, especially Father Damien, are suspicious of him; the women are largely captivated – none more so than the beautiful and unhappily married Fidelma McBride, who has suffered two miscarriages and longs for a child. She asks Vlad for help with her fertility problems and falls in love with him.

As the novel progresses it becomes apparent that Vlad is not who he seems. His name and occupation are inventions, and we discover that he is in fact a Serbian war criminal in flight from justice (we are invited to think of him as a version of Radovan Karadzic, who adopted the alias Dr Dragan David Babic while hiding from the authorities between 1996 and 2008). In the wake of this revelation, both Vlad and Fidelma are subjected to different kinds of retribution. Vlad’s culminates in a trial at The Hague. The unravelling of Fidelma’s life, which initially takes place at the hands of a community determined to punish her for her transgression (and later finds her living an etiolated existence in London), is almost comically remorseless.

O’Brien’s handling of this story of the consequences of revealed evil is assured and intelligent. Her presentation of Fidelma’s attempt to understand how she could have fallen for an individual apparently so dedicated to healing and the act of creation, yet evidently capable of atrocities, is full of empathy and insight but never courts explanation or exoneration. She simply shows us that the capacity for creation and the capacity for destruction is present in all of us; that beauty and barbarism are often contiguous; that the impulse to create is not always easy to distinguish from the impulse to destroy. Ethnic cleansers do tend to think of themselves as moral cleansers.

In the case of Vlad, the "cleansing" assumed terrible proportions: the little red chairs of O'Brien's title refer to the 11,541 plastic seats that were laid out on a street in Sarajevo in 2012 to commemorate those who died during the siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces that began in 1992. Yet despite the scale of the suffering chronicled here, this is not a melancholy book. It is a tale that is full of the affirmative power of story and of literature (the book features many allusions), and O'Brien's use of language, while strange, unsettling, sometimes otherworldly – is almost always characterised by a particularity and precision that suffuses The Little Red Chairs with a sense of the value of the individual – of the individual's words, thoughts, and feelings. These, O'Brien knows, might only be fragments. But they are all that we have to shore against the ruins of history.

Matthew Adams is a London-­based reviewer who writes for the TLS, the Spectator and the Literary Review.