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PRINT Tom Lordan Luke Warde Girl is a flawed test
ament to a career of audacity. Experiments on Reality Tim Robinson [Penguin] Girl Edna O’Brien [Faber] Tim Robinson is an artist-cartographer born in Yorkshire, who moved to the west of Ireland almost 50 years ago, and who now writes beautiful, elegant non-fiction prose. Before settling among the Irish, Robinson studied mathematics at Cambridge University, and lived in London, Vienna and Istanbul. On the basis of his two-volume study of the Aran Islands and three-volume study of Connemara, he is widely considered one of Ireland’s greatest living writers. Small wonder then, that this new book of autobiographical vignettes is a delight to read. For the most part the chapters are short, some only two or three pages long, and they recount episodes of Robinson’s life in his inimitable style, which is at once clinical and lyrical. Memories of Yorkshire’s landscape and Ilkey, the town, he writes, that “incubated my interminable adolescence,” open the book, followed by reminiscences of his travels, his art projects, and the natural alchemy of the west of Ireland. The sheer breadth of writing is a joy, and Robinson’s range includes exercises in literary form. The elliptical ‘The Orient Express’, in which every second line is bisected, is an entertaining geometrical experiment. But Robinson is at his best when explaining physical phenomena. He has a naturalist’s eye and a philosopher’s mind. A favourite episode involves his ruminating on what it means to have a centre of gravity, “the umbilicus of my gravitational being.” I greatly recommend. TL Almost 60 years separates the dates of publication, and around 7,000 kilometres the backdrops, of Edna O’Brien’s first and controversial novel, The Country Girls, from her most recent offering, Girl. Yet their affinities as much as their differences are striking: Girl continues O’Brien’s careerlong engagement with the subject of male brutality, the excesses of which she has documented for decades, often with a horrifying acuity. The narrative draws heavily on the Jihadist group Boko Haram’s infamous 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in North-Eastern Nigeria. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that O’Brien, whose books were banned in Ireland until well into the 1970s (and some even allegedly burnt at her local parish’s behest) would take an interest in the victims of Boko Haram, a group one of whose central tenets is a prohibition on the education of women. O’Brien’s story focuses in particular on the harrowing story of Maryam, who is abducted and subjected to a series of punishments the description of which most writers – not without reason – would abjure. Maryam is enslaved, repeatedly raped, and then coerced into marriage and motherhood. O’Brien confronts us with these enormities in gruesome, unflinching detail. The novel’s first third is a compendium of horror, whose abatement opens up onto more familiar terrain for O’Brien, at least in her more recent fiction: lyrical lament. Even after Maryam’s escape and eventual return home, succour is far from forthcoming; she is feted by cynical political forces as a symbol of alleged Christian innocence vis-à-vis Muslim barbarity, all the while being relentlessly shamed by those around her for refusing to relinquish her newborn daughter, Babby. Maryam is fictional; she is O’Brien’s ‘girl’: she incarnates and ventriloquises a plurality of sufferings and sufferers, whom O’Brien hopes will speak through her. The prose, much of it in free indirect discourse, is eerily lambent and almost incantatory. For that matter, it’s no surprise that O’Brien, who doesn’t type, dictated the novel to a typist. Yet, one of her greatest strengths, this effortless lyricism, is also one of Girl’s primary failings. It’s at times hard not to hear O’Brien – a canonical writer whose technical mastery of the novel form everywhere bejewels the text – where we might wish to hear Maryam: the tragic schoolgirl struggling to find a language with which to give voice to her own pain. These are complex issues of which O’Brien is hardly unaware. As she documents in Girl’s acknowledgements, she undertook more than one trip to Nigeria to conduct background research and to meet some of those involved in the kidnapping. While it can often seem that the revolutionaries of yesteryear are the reactionaries of today, it would be hard to accuse the octogenarian O’Brien, a consummate rebel, of being somehow conservative. Girl is a flawed testament to a career of audacity. LW 72