HER OWN PRIVATE IRELAND

IN `DOWN BY THE RIVER,' EDNA O'BRIEN IMAGINES ONE GIRL'S FEARFUL ISOLATION

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 25, 1997

Page: N13

Section: Books

From such mists of language rise stories of great beauty, many of which were banned in Ireland decades ago. (She has lived in London for the past 30 years.) For O'Brien has not only cracked the repressive code surrounding female sexuality, she has all but exalted it, taking Molly Bloom's famous assent where Joyce left off and saying yes a thousand times more. Her last novel, ``House of Splendid Isolation,'' was a departure from that fecund territory, focusing instead upon the crisis-induced intimacy of an elderly woman and her captor, a member of the Irish Republican Army. Now ``Down by the River'' appears some three years later, and it gives us the best of both parallel worlds -- the social forces of a modern Ireland, tinged and defined by the deeper, more private cataclysms of shame and desire.

``Down by the River'' is a political novel in the most excellent sense, shocking and searingly personal and illustrative of a larger wrongdoing. Its story is drawn from the infamous case before Ireland's Supreme Court in 1992, in which a 14-year-old girl had been hauled back by injunction from England, where she had gone to obtain an abortion. The high court finally ruled in the girl's favor, allowing her to leave the country and do as she chose; the decision and the furor surrounding it took what was already a huge rift in Ireland and brought it to international attention. O'Brien has imagined a similar incident and placed at its center a young girl named Mary MacNamara -- at the mercy of several kinds of tyranny, from the father who rapes her to the public pressure upon her to bear his child.

This is a horrible story, of course, and it's hard to imagine anyone making it shimmer with a mellifluent compassion; O'Brien has done so. Much of her success lies in the mutability with which she traverses several dissonant realities: the fears of a heartsick girl; the self-loathing and muck of an abusive father; the preoccupations of the police and barristers and judges who will decide the MacNamara family's fate. Throughout the novel is a naturalist strain of the greater forces at work in the world that wrought this tragedy -- horses foaling, rivers widening, lonely women seeking refuge from their stone-cold lives wherever they can. Mary's own mother takes solace in denial, felled by her husband's blows and mostly blind to her daughter's plight, until cancer claims her and leaves Mary utterly without protection. The father understands the cruel and all-obliterating power of shame; he rapes the girl and then blames her for his weakness, so that she is hostage to her own silence. She has been witness to her father's worst darkness, and that, to him, must be unforgiven.

Several saviors appear on Mary's road out of Gomorrah: the sisters at the convent where she stays until her mother's death, a young musician in the city who offers her a place to sleep, a neighbor woman who, realizing the girl is pregnant from her father's rages, takes her to England. They are found out and forced to return home, at the mercy of the courts and subject to the emotional terrorism inflicted by maybe-well-intentioned zealots. Mary's world grows smaller: Away from her father's invasions, she is beset instead by the legacy he left inside her and the responsibility it demands. She is almost 14, her father tells an interrogator -- or wait, he thinks, ashamed; he does not know his daughter's age.

``The wee Magdalene,'' the radio show hosts call her, for Mary is subject, too, to her crime being tried by the press and the talk shows before the judges' decision. ``Down by the River'' flings itself from one stiflingly realized milieu to the next, from the overheated parlors of Mary's religious captors to the city streets where she is hungry and sick. She is so adrift, so young and unprotected, that she even longs for her father -- remembering the gentle way he handled a mare in labor, she imagines he might show her the same tenderness. This circular path is charted with emotional authenticity, and O'Brien sustains her story with a momentum that all but overwhelms its outcome. Whatever fate awaits Mary, we know that the worst of it has already happened.

That is the agony of the novel, which carves up its enemies with unflinching nerve. Sometimes O'Brien's prose is overwrought. She sketches her story line with broad strokes, more concerned with authorial description than with character depth, and the result can be more florid than insightful. But she has tried to humanize her entire cast: the judges who must hear Mary's case; the women who scream at their captive Jezebel that she is headed for hell; even James MacNamara, wandering in his far more certain hell alone. ``He was the wrong father,'' Mary tells one of her protectors. ``That's all.'' She's too young to have to know such forgiveness, though she has already glimpsed the mercy available only to those who have suffered greatly. But she is in good hands here in Edna O'Brien's imagined world, for ``Down by the River'' is kissed by fire. I couldn't have borne it, had it not been told with such elegiac grace.

They walk in silence, the man several leagues ahead, his soft brown hat a greenish shard in the bright sunlight, a bold rapparee, his stride animated with a kind of revelrous frenzy, traffic growing fainter and fainter, a clackety river beyond and in the odd gusts of wind the under-sides of the larches purling up to show ballroom skirts of spun-silver. The road silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of the old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood.

EDNA O'BRIEN, from ``Down by the River''