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Description
EDNA O'BRIEN The Light of Evening Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, $25.00
'FOR WE THINK BACK through our mothers if we are women."
Whether Woolf's famous dictum holds true for all women writers, it certainly defines the work of Edna O'Brien. From her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), which announced a breakthrough in Irish women's writing, to The Light of Evening (2006), her most recent work of fiction, O'Brien has always been consumed by the relation of the daughter to the mother, and more broadly, to the Motherland. The Light of Evening's very dedication--For My Mother, and My Motherland--confirms the centrality of this trinity of daughter, mother, and land to O'Brien. In this, her twentieth work of fiction, O'Brien has written the book that she has attempted throughout her career to write, the letter between daughter and mother that seeks to express all that has gone unsaid in that relationship, both in O'Brien's fictional worlds and in her own life.
The Light of Evening is really several novels, or multiple stories brought together. It contains O'Brien's ur-story, the plight of the emerging female Irish writer that she first voiced in The Country Girls and has returned to in various forms throughout her career. Eleanora, an expatriate Irish writer living in London, is a clear figure of O'Brien herself. The novel also focuses on Eleanora's relationship with her mother, Dilly, maintaining the mother-daughter theme that runs throughout O'Brien's fiction. But O'Brien tells several new stories here, such as Dilly's experiences as a migrant in Brooklyn in the 1920's, and especially the story of contemporary Ireland, a rapidly changing land filled with subdivisions, a restless pursuit of wealth, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the plight of the old generation as they face the end of their lives, the loss of their lands, and the fading of their world to a rapacious and uncaring generation that they themselves have reared.
The novel progresses through... |
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