Book cover of Saints and Sinners. Photo / Supplied
Saints And Sinners by Edna O'Brien
Faber $36.99
Edna O'Brien turned 80 last year. The energy and immediacy of these 11 stories makes that hard to believe. Ireland is once again her territory, except for a dazed, desperate affair in Manhattan and the frightening Plunder, set in an unspecified place of "mauled carcasses and bits of torn skin".
A number of the narratives seem to come from earlier, heavier, more absolute times. There are dark parlours, groups of old men on benches, a long white motor coat. Intermittently, there's phrasing to match: "unbeknownst to ... a bit of a card ... went cuckoo". None of this detracts from the universal truths that O'Brien conveys so insistently.
Some stories invest the form with near-epic dimensions. Some observe every moment in an exchange or episode: one visit to afternoon tea opens a gulf into the participants' lives.
Belonging or not belonging is a recurrent motif. In Shovel Kings, the book's first and longest piece, set largely in a London pub crammed with green gewgaws, an Irish navvy outlines his life of brute labour, dereliction, and drifting between two cultures. Black Flower has a prisoner and a visitor who both labour to find identity when they meet outside the walls.
The narrators are nearly all women, damaged but dauntless. They yearn for better things, yet stoically accept their lot - a lot which frequently involves errant, irritable, tyrannical husbands who want tea served before their wife is allowed to go out.
Once again, Edna O'Brien catalogues various forms of Irish unhappiness. Her characters can't communicate, won't communicate, or persist distressingly in trying to communicate.
In Sinners, the shock of sexual boundaries apparently breached is set against the sadder realisation of boundaries never challenged.
Elsewhere, a woman acknowledges that "her heart had walled up a long time ago". Another grieves that her husband's eyes "are not on me and not for me and it is awful". Marriages "grew bleaker amid the desolations of age". Love "always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give".
O'Brien is a sobering read: meticulous, quiet, always honest. She remains a calm, cleaving chronicler of straitened lives.
