Pagan Place

This book examines the female experience of being an artist, being Irish, and coming of age. Sound familiar? Edna O'Brien updates James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. She is sensitive, connecting paganism, sexuality and death, quickly (within the first 15 pages of the book). The protagonist struggles with her Irish upbringing, which connects Christianity with purity and chastity. Unlike Stephen Dedalus, she cannot use religion as an ordering device which he can eventually and ultimately reject. Instead, this protagonist becomes immobalized by the struggle between the two and unable to transcend the very society that entraps her. Like Joyce, O'Brien uses stream of consciousness techinques, but without the utter sense of chaos and disillusionment. She is subtle and she allows other voices to speak in her novel. For example, "You tried to whistle. Only men should whistle (parent voice). The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs (voice from church). It intrigues you thinking of the Bledded Virgin having to blush so frequently (protagonist's voice). The bird that had the most lifelike whistle was the curlew (teacher's voice)." Edna O'Brien's voice is a multifarious voice which captures many of the voices that surround a child coming of age. This is a book about identity that will dazzle you with its writing and with its final outcomes. I not only read this book when I was studying in Ireland, but I now teach this book in an Irish Literature class in the United States. This is a must read.