If what you’re looking for is a map of Ireland, the fiction of Edna O’Brien will do just fine. Now in the first year of her ninth decade, O’Brien has been writing about her native land for half a century — her celebrated first novel, “The Country Girls,” was published in 1960 — and has laid a claim on it that is as strong as the ones staked by the likes of James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey and Elizabeth Bowen, to name only four of the innumerable brilliant writers born in that beautiful, troubled, haunting place. Though perhaps the dominant theme in her work is what she calls “how inexplicable love was,” she is also possessed by a love for Ireland and a deep knowledge of its history, legend and character.
Like the grandmother in her fine new story “Inner Cowboy,” O’Brien is drawn to “the olden days, when shops were drapery and grocery and hardware all in one,” but in this story as elsewhere in “Saints and Sinners” there is a new Ireland, one that she ferociously dislikes. This is the Ireland of the 2000s and the Celtic Tiger, the mad boom that made the country momentarily the envy of almost every other nation on earth and then plunged it into chaos and recrimination that will plague it for decades.
‘Saints and Sinners: Stories’ by Edna O'Brien (Back Bay. 245 pp. Paperback, $13.99)
By far the best nonfiction account of this phenomenon is “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger,” published a year ago by the superb columnist of the Irish Times Fintan O’Toole. It is a ferociously angry book — and at times a very funny one — and a similar anger is to be found in “Saints and Sinners.” Curly, the protagonist of “Inner Cowboy,” talks to a gardener with whom he occasionally works. He “said rich bastards were ruining Ireland, poisoning it, the McSorley brothers and their ilk grabbing, buying up every perch of farm, bog, and quarry they could get their hands on.” One of those brothers is Daragh McSorley: “No one knows the scope of his ambition, the passion, the relentless unrest.” He “was famous for the loud laugh that had little mirth in it,” and “as for bad feeling, there was so much bad feeling vented on him that he could bottle it and sell it like holy water.”
“Greed,” a priest says at the end of this story, “was ruining the country, people no longer showed the compassion that they once had.” A variation on the theme is played in another exceptionally fine story, “Send My Roots Rain.” A librarian is waiting in a Dublin hotel lounge to meet a famous poet:
“She began imagining things they might talk about at first, the changes that had occurred in their country, changes that were not for the better, bulldozers everywhere and the craze for money. Money, money, money. The rich going to lunch in their helicopters, chopping the air and shredding the white mist, their wives outdoing each other with jewelry and finery, stirring their champagne with gold swizzle sticks, and Mrs. Jamieson boasting about their drapes from the palazzo of a gentleman in Milan and a tea set shipped from Virginia that had once belonged to a president of the United States. Pictures on their walls of bog and bogland, where they no longer set foot, priceless pictures of these lonesome and beautiful landscapes and pictures of bog lilies that lay like serrated stars on pools of purple-black bog water. . . . That little hussy who sued the Church Fathers because the sleeve of her coat singed as she was lighting a candle actually employed the family solicitor to press for compensation and he did, egging her on, encouraging her in this rotten ploy.”
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