The Light of Evening

It's an intense pleasure of the senses to read Edna O'Brien and this novel is gorgeously written - I trust this author as I read and I admire how visual her writing is. I long for things I've never known when I read her. I can't read this on a bus - I must be in the bath or on the couch (with rain out the window) with tea or hot chocolate, as then I'm enveloped; her writing deserves full attention.

The most difficult of the parent-child relationships is the one between mother and daughter. If you don't think so, just tell a woman she is acting like her mother, but don't do it while she's holding anything sharp. In this book Ms. O'Brien explores this relationship between a mother in the hospital dying of cancer and her daughter who has moved away. As the book progresses we find that the lives, the actions of the two women are not all that different. In her youth mother had left her family for New York. More recently daughter has gone off to London. Ms. O'Brien uses this to bring out the differences in the generations, or is it the changes in the times in which they live? Finally I've got to say that Ms. O'Brien confirms her Irish literary background with the tragic overtones in the story. There seems to be something about the literature from Irish authors that prevents them from having happy, normal, well adjusted personalities. She also confirms her status of being a major novelist of our time.

I can't pretend to be objective about Edna O'Brien's work. I've admired her for years. But I can honestly say this book is the finest work I've read all year. Other reviewers have already covered the book's beauty in full detail. You'll just have to read it for yourself. But do set aside at least one full day to immerself in this extraordinary work of art, because you won't want to be interrupted.

In this poetic story of mothers and daughters and grandmothers, memory and remembrance perpetually shroud and encapsulate the present. As the novel begins, Dilly, a woman of advancing age is told that she must go to Dublin for observation. Dilly lies in a hospital bed and begins to see her life pass before her in rapid succession, "like clouds - different shapes and different colours, merging and passing one another." As her life is steadily pulled out of her, like pages pulled from a book, she falls into fitful dreams where her chequered past gradually emerges. Determined to make a new life for herself, away from her domineering mother and the "troubles" of Ireland, Dilly travels to New York to start a new life. After a hellish sea voyage, Dilly is forced to go through Ellis Island where she and the other immigrants are subjected to every kind of humiliation, herded into different groups, names and numbers tagged into chests, the inspectors like hawks, looking for every sickness. Now in America, a world that seems both strange and carnival-like, "a land of bluff and blighted dreams," Tilly's cousin provides her with a room in a boarding house and employment as a domestic servant in the home of a Mr. and Mrs. McCormack, a bourgeois couple who advocate "nothing but rules." It is here in this life existing of "crush-proof blouses and coatees and capes stoles and muffs," that Tilly finds her only real friend in fellow maid Solveig and has a love affair with a young man that ends in disaster. Finding New York a place of intense pressure, here "people are always moving on so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could," Tilly's efforts to breakaway from her family are not that successful and she eventually returns to her roots in Ireland where she marries and has a family. Whilst the bells inside Dilly's head, chime half a century apart, bringing her gradually awake, her mind constantly clogged with "memories and with muddle." The crux of her thinking is always with her family and her children, as she disentangles the hurts they have caused her. Her son Terence has fallen under the influence of a grasping wife and has become as avaricious as she, and her daughter Eleanor has always had her head constantly stuck in the clouds. Now a talented author, Eleanor earns the distain of Dilly for marrying Hermann, a domineering older man whom Dilly is convinced that her daughter did not love. Eleanor actually confesses that she had eloped in a trance, in haste, her docility a mask. Even Hermann would always contend that Eleanor had married him under the guise of love, to better her ambitions. By choosing this madman for a husband, Dilly contends that her daughter has driven a last nail in her mother's coffin, the gulf between mother and daughter finally becoming insurmountable. The novel is a poetic homage to what is left unsaid, where a mother and a daughter have held each other at a distance for so long. Eleanor in particular, is unab

The book is somewhat cryptic and much happens. But you realize three quarters of the way in that the story is not in the actions, but in the unsaid. And there's lots of unsaid. It's the emotional story of the relationship between mother and daughter. The emotional current of this story is steady and you wonder what lies at the bottom of the conflict. Maybe there is no bottom, just two generations, two views, two worlds. If you know Ireland, you'll be able to flesh out the sparce description and feel the coldness. This is also a story about the conflict between modern vs. traditional society in Ireland that few are telling successfully. The story levies a heavy emotional toll and it is completely satisfying. In the end, I am left wondering why the characters acted the way they did, yet understanding perfectly well the way they feel. There's the contradiction, there's the mystery.