In the Forest

A boy, robbed off his mother's love at the age of ten. Refusing to believe she is dead, clinging to the idea that she was buried alive while she was sleeping, digging a hole into the ground near her grave in order to speak to her. A loner who, then and there, decides to become "a true son of the forest," as his mother in a dream apparition has told him to be. (Or was that an early delusion?) An adolescent, locked up in juvenile homes, boarding schools, prisons and other institutions, abused by a priest, neglected, ignored, and locking himself off against the outside world in response. Putting to practice the one lesson he has learned from Lazlo, the boys' schizophrenic leader in the first such institution; Lazlo who heard voices and who has taught him that the one thing that counts is to hate "them" (the grown-ups, those that stand for authority and society as a whole) with a worse hate than they have for him. A young man, unable to show any feeling other than that long-practiced hatred; acting out his suppressed emotions in violence whenever he is not locked up, unable to escape the voices now talking in his head more and more often, just as they were once talking in Lazlo's. And a young woman with long red hair. Maddie's mother, raising her young son alone, breaking off all relationships with men as soon as they get to close for comfort. An outsider, only recently moved to the village. A teacher. An artist. Mistress of ceremonies at a Celtic festival, performing pagan rituals. Druidess. Mystery woman whom nobody knows with complete intimacy, maybe not even her sister Cassandra and her best friend Madge. Raped and murdered by a young man trapped between insanity and emotional deprivation, for whom she is the realization of everything he associates with the idea of the female - simultaneously fairy queen, virgin, angel, object of his sexual fantasies, [...], confidante and most importantly, mother. This is the couple which, in the deadly dance at the heart of Edna O'Brien's "In the Forest," is locked together by fate; a fate prompted by the murderer's delusions and rage as much as by society's inability to deal with him. And this first murder is only the starting point of a killing spree which will demand several more victims before the young man is apprehended. Like two of O'Brien's previous novels, "Down by the River" (addressing incest, abortion and society's inability to deal with either, as expressed in the trial of a girl who went to England to abort the child conceived from her own father) and "House of Splendid Isolation" (inspired by the Irish "troubles"), "In the Forest" is based on a series of real events which deeply shook the Irish society in the mid-1990s, and which occurred in the county which O'Brien, before moving to London, used to call her home. But here as there, the author is less interested in the hard, cold facts as such but rather, in the psychology involved and society's response to the unspeakable horror of the crimes

A boy, robbed off his mother's love at the age of ten. Refusing to believe she is dead, clinging to the idea that she was buried alive while she was sleeping, digging a hole into the ground near her grave in order to speak to her. A loner who, then and there, decides to become "a true son of the forest," as his mother in a dream apparition has told him to be. (Or was that an early delusion?) An adolescent, locked up in juvenile homes, boarding schools, prisons and other institutions, abused by a priest, neglected, ignored, and locking himself off against the outside world in response. Putting to practice the one lesson he has learned from Lazlo, the boys' schizophrenic leader in the first such institution; Lazlo who heard voices and who has taught him that the one thing that counts is to hate "them" (the grown-ups, those that stand for authority and society as a whole) with a worse hate than they have for him. A young man, unable to show any feeling other than that long-practiced hatred; acting out his suppressed emotions in violence whenever he is not locked up, unable to escape the voices now talking in his head more and more often, just as they were once talking in Lazlo's. And a young woman with long red hair. Maddie's mother, raising her young son alone, breaking off all relationships with men as soon as they get to close for comfort. An outsider, only recently moved to the village. A teacher. An artist. Mistress of ceremonies at a Celtic festival, performing pagan rituals. Druidess. Mystery woman whom nobody knows with complete intimacy, maybe not even her sister Cassandra and her best friend Madge. Raped and murdered by a young man trapped between insanity and emotional deprivation, for whom she is the realization of everything he associates with the idea of the female - simultaneously fairy queen, virgin, angel, object of his sexual fantasies, whore, confidante and most importantly, mother. This is the couple which, in the deadly dance at the heart of Edna O'Brien's "In the Forest," is locked together by fate; a fate prompted by the murderer's delusions and rage as much as by society's inability to deal with him. And this first murder is only the starting point of a killing spree which will demand several more victims before the young man is apprehended. - Like two of her previous novels, "House of Splendid Isolation" (inspired by the Irish "troubles") and "Down By the River" (addressing incest, abortion and society's inability to deal with either, as expressed in the trial of a girl who went to England to abort the child conceived from her own father), Ms. O'Brien's latest book is based on a series of real events which deeply shook the Irish society in the mid-1990s, and which occurred in the county which O'Brien, before moving to London, used to call her home. But here as there, the author is less interested in the hard, cold facts as such but rather, in the psychology involved and society's response to the unspeakabl

After reading the opening paragraph of this newest novel from Edna O'Brien, 'In the Forest,' I was hooked. Her lush prose is so descriptive that I felt I was being drawn into that dark wood to revisit the scene of one of the most heinous crimes in the Irish Republic in the past twenty years. Between April 29 and May 7, 1994, Brendan O'Donnell, 20, abducted five people and murdered three. The innocent victims, whose bodies were found in shallow graves in Cleggs Woods, were artist Imelda Riney, her 3-year-old son, Liam, and Father Joe Walsh. At the time, the consciousness of the countryside of County Clare, where Ms. O'Brien had grown up, was galvanized in fear of this psychopathic killer. 'They are afraid of him now, the Kinderschreck, one of their own sons come out of their own soil, their own flesh and blood, gone amok.' Mr. O'Donnell was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment, but, in 1997, he died while in prison from a drug interaction.Not since reading 'In Cold Blood,' by Truman Capote, have I encountered a book based on a true crime as riveting as this one. This Irish Gothic novel is 'faction'; Ms. O'Brien bases her narrative on factual events around the time of the crime, but she has fictionalized the names and places. The editorial reviews give a good plot synopsis for this novel, so I will focus my remarks elsewhere. Ms. O'Brien uses the true crime story as a springboard to comment on the Irish experience. Here she handles such hot topics as politics and sexual politics, paganism, priest pedophilia, and child abuse. As Jeanette Winterson stated recently on a BBC panel that discussed this book, '[t]he 20th century has been the century all the ordinary categories have been broken down, between fiction and non-fiction, between the real and the imagined, between autobiography and invention. . . . Edna O'Brien succeeds here perfectly.'Her style in this novel is what I might call 'Faulkneresque-lite.' About when I would think the prose was becoming too purple for my taste, she seemed to shift into a sparer phrasing. The Gothic style is a perfect match for the story because her descriptions of the forest are so vivid that one feels fear and dread and senses the gloom of this place without light. 'How engulfing the darkness, how useless their tracks in the rust-brown carnage of old dead leaves. Pines and spruces close together, their tall solid trunks like an army going on and on, in unending sequence, furrows of muddy brown water and no birds and no sound other than that of a wind, unceasing, like the sound of a distant sea. But it is not sea, it is Cloosh Wood, and they are being marched through it.' One approach to reading, 'In the Forest,' would be to look at the forest, woods, and trees - the landscape - as metaphor. Her powerful prose imagery engages the imagination through an association of forests and woods with primordial fears of dark, damp, deep, and devouring places. The pacing of the story is brilliant, and it keeps one

Edna O'Brien, with this novel and "Girl with the Green Eyes," became part of my first trip to Dublin. Despite my motives for perusing charming Irish stories, this novel is anything but lightweight and packs a sobering and disturbing emotional wallop.This is the story of Mich, demented young man ripe for murder. Ms. O'Brien traces his emotional development and dementia through a precise and evocative outline of his mother's death, the constant abuse from other children and adults at home and later in various institutions, including sexual abuse by a priest as well as physical abuse by guards. By the time he is let out of these institutions he claims that his head "isn't right" and is already a proven criminal. Ms. O'Brien makes it clear that although he is dangerous, he suffers intense emotional turmoil. This is also a story of a West Ireland country community and several new residents such as a young woman named Eily and her three year old son Maddie. When Mich is let out of prison and returns to the village he stalks Eily and eventually abducts her and her son. The entire community is terrified of Mich but are slow to react and are, as a result, responsible in part for the tragedies which occur. Finally, after the crimes have been committed, panic sets in and Mich is hunted down both by civilians and law enforcers with avidity. This thirst for justice continues throughout his capture and interrogations. Every recounted moment is agonizing and painful from the point of view of both the criminal and the lawmen. Mich is convicted and descends further into his own mental hell. Despite the occasional use of harmless Irish colloquialisms and customs, this story is deeply upsetting.I like to avoid making conscious references to concrete symbolism in literature but in this case the notion of the forest in the title can't be avoided. It is clear that we are taken into both a physical forest and the "forest" of Mich's mind. If handled clumsily this could become tedious but in this story it's both atmospheric and necessary. In the end, a little boy loses himself in these same woods, in the same place where hell was enacted. He sleeps peacefully in the pine needles. "Magic," Edna O'Brien tells us "follows only the few."

"In the Forest" borders on creative nonfiction. Based on real, gruesome events which took place in one of the western counties of Ireland, the book is a fictionalized account of these events, augmented by equally fictional life story of the protagonist. It's hard to say that Michen O'Kane is a protagonist, really, because the weight of importance is quite substantially dispersed in the novel. Although the events and the backbone of the storyline are central to the narration, I think the author has undertaken quite a different direction in the book; the ultimate accent is put on the setting, the neighborhood, the analysis of circumstances, rather than the usual set of characters, be they major or minor. The author almost never ventures deeply into the character's introspection, which is merely just another block in the mosaic, never dominating the remainder. Despite that fact, "In the Forest" is a fascinating psychological studium of deviation. Having provided the literary account of the slaughter and the paranoia that preceded it, Edna O'Brien wanted to pin down the reasons why at one time in the life of a man, a seemingly unimportant event can change the whole life of this individual, what are the motivations that inevitably push him to the edge of the abyss, and then one step too far, past the point of return, and precisely why there is no point of return, once the mind snaps, once the critical mass of confusion is achieved, and the darkness of madness starts to dominate from that point on. One might suppose that to provide a fictional background for the shocking, real-life events is quite common and unoriginal, and that the reader might pretty well guess what to expect from the novel of this type. The point is, "In the Forest" is not the novel of any such type, and certainly you will be surprised if you think that "In the Forest" can be categorized using any genre classifications. To pigeonhole a novel of this class is indeed a crime. Short chapters, one by one, introduce us to many viewpoints, where narration styles are blended, perspectives skewed, mixed and exchanged, where exactly when you expect the action to pick up, the flow of the story becomes sublime and poetic, and when you get progressively used to the book being a wonderfully painted portrayal of the Irish country with the unique communities inhabiting them, the flow is brutally intercepted with a sequence of chapters with all accents inverted. Reading this book is a pleasure hardly comparable with anything that may await the reader of contemporary fiction in the new century. Edna O'Brien is I think one of the greatest living and active novelists of our day. It's quite uncommon for a writer to get better and better over the many long years, usually it's the other way round. Anno Domini 2002, it's no longer enough to say that Edna O'Brien has her own, instantly recognizable style, that her writing is of unmatched class, of sparkling beauty and mesmerizing, poetic narration, where e