Mother and I
Edna O'Brien came into Broadcasting House in London today to be interviewed for the next series of the Book Programme. This was the first time I've spoken with her. We did share a stage once in Belfast, when she was accepting an honorary doctorate from Queen's University and I was graduating. She's now an honorary professor at University College Dublin, though she still lives in London.
I mention all that because O'Brien's rather lukewarm reception by the Irish academic world is one of the things I wanted to talk to her about today. I consider her a writer of enormous importance, and I can't fathom why it's taken so long for the literary academy to shower her with the praise she deserves. In America, she is treated like a living Faulkner; but in Ireland for too long she's been treated by some like the purveyor of literary chick lit.
I'm delighted to see all that changing now, and her new book, The Light of Evening -- her seventeenth novel -- will do nothing to reduce her stature. The novel is about mothers and daughters -- written, as it is, by a mother two sons with no daughter of her own. The elderly Dilly, prepararing for death, recalls the part of her youth spent in domestic serive in Brooklyn (New York is O'Brien's favourite city, and her own mother spent part of her youth in similar work there). Eleanore, the daughter, is a writer who has struggled with both her relationship wth her mother and with Ireland. These are only some of the autobiographical connections; but this is no disguised memoir. It is an extremely moving account of the "blood feud, blood bond" ... and "blood memory鈥 that can characterise the unfinished business of childhood and parenthood.
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