In the Forest [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Not since reading 'In Cold Blood,' by Truman Capote, have I encountered a book based on a true crime as riveting as this one. This Irish Gothic novel is 'faction'; Ms. O'Brien bases her narrative on factual events around the time of the crime, but she has fictionalized the names and places. The editorial reviews give a good plot synopsis for this novel, so I will focus my remarks elsewhere.

Ms. O'Brien uses the true crime story as a springboard to comment on the Irish experience. Here she handles such hot topics as politics and sexual politics, paganism, priest pedophilia, and child abuse. As Jeanette Winterson stated recently on a BBC panel that discussed this book, '[t]he 20th century has been the century all the ordinary categories have been broken down, between fiction and non-fiction, between the real and the imagined, between autobiography and invention. . . . Edna O'Brien succeeds here perfectly.'

Her style in this novel is what I might call 'Faulkneresque-lite.' About when I would think the prose was becoming too purple for my taste, she seemed to shift into a sparer phrasing. The Gothic style is a perfect match for the story because her descriptions of the forest are so vivid that one feels fear and dread and senses the gloom of this place without light. 'How engulfing the darkness, how useless their tracks in the rust-brown carnage of old dead leaves. Pines and spruces close together, their tall solid trunks like an army going on and on, in unending sequence, furrows of muddy brown water and no birds and no sound other than that of a wind, unceasing, like the sound of a distant sea. But it is not sea, it is Cloosh Wood, and they are being marched through it.'

One approach to reading, 'In the Forest,' would be to look at the forest, woods, and trees - the landscape - as metaphor. Her powerful prose imagery engages the imagination through an association of forests and woods with primordial fears of dark, damp, deep, and devouring places. The pacing of the story is brilliant, and it keeps one turning pages well into the wee hours of the morning. My sole criticism of this stunning book has to do with the ending, which has a bit of a tacked-on feel to it. While there may be an essential Irishness to the need for atonement and repentance, the narrative here seems somewhat contrived. The final passage is a bit of Irish magic, as if to say that the darkness ends here, now come to the light.

'In the Forest' contains an evocative icon: 'the Kinderschreck,' or 'meaning someone of whom small children are afraid.' This image of bogeyman or monster is part of our collective unconscious. It's found in our fairy tales and is sometimes used to scare children into being good. The women in the search party for the victims of 'the Kinderschreck,' Michen O'Kane, said, 'Deep down we believe he has been sent by God, as punishment upon us.'

As many have said, Edna O'Brien is one of the greatest working novelists today. If you've not read any of her books, 'In the Forest' is a good place to begin.

One might suppose that to provide a fictional background for the shocking, real-life events is quite common and unoriginal, and that the reader might pretty well guess what to expect from the novel of this type. The point is, "In the Forest" is not the novel of any such type, and certainly you will be surprised if you think that "In the Forest" can be categorized using any genre classifications. To pigeonhole a novel of this class is indeed a crime. Short chapters, one by one, introduce us to many viewpoints, where narration styles are blended, perspectives skewed, mixed and exchanged, where exactly when you expect the action to pick up, the flow of the story becomes sublime and poetic, and when you get progressively used to the book being a wonderfully painted portrayal of the Irish country with the unique communities inhabiting them, the flow is brutally intercepted with a sequence of chapters with all accents inverted. Reading this book is a pleasure hardly comparable with anything that may await the reader of contemporary fiction in the new century.

Edna O'Brien is I think one of the greatest living and active novelists of our day. It's quite uncommon for a writer to get better and better over the many long years, usually it's the other way round. Anno Domini 2002, it's no longer enough to say that Edna O'Brien has her own, instantly recognizable style, that her writing is of unmatched class, of sparkling beauty and mesmerizing, poetic narration, where even the unthinkable and devastating shines on like a lone diamond down by the Irish river. An absolutely stunning phenomenon of this writer is that she continues to innovate, to expand the boundaries of the literary world of fiction. After so many years, several highly revered books, the new entries leave us wondering if there is any limit at all. We find ourselves in an awkward situation, where each and every books of Edna rises the threshold of expectations, and yet the next entry surpasses the predecessors and the updated expectations alike. "In the Forest" is pure delight, the exhilarating reading experience, the penultimate dot over i, after which nothing else seems to add anything of interest on the topic.