Under the Rose by Julia O’Faolain review: like father, unlike daughter

Under the Rose

Author: Julia O’Faolain

ISBN-13: 978-0571294909

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Guideline Price: £13.99

This eloquent and compelling collection makes one thing clear: Julia O’Faolain’s voice has a rare power that carries across themes and times. “I like fiction to be a Trojan horse,” she has said. Certainly the stories in this volume slip behind a reader’s defences almost at once, and stay there.

There are 20 stories here. Most have been published in collections, some in journals. They sit side by side thematically, not chronologically. Daughters of Passion, from 1982, begins the collection; the last story, Will You Please Go Now, comes from the same date, the same collection. All the stories include tracts of narrative, fractions of character, adeptly managed situations. Many of these, as the book goes on, can be seen meeting and framing each other, as if the continuum of plot and person recognised no momentum of time, only of theme.

For all the art and energy of this work, however, O’Faolain’s trajectory has not been smooth. In 2009 a British newspaper article stated: “O’Faolain is a wonderful stylist and an exciting writer, which makes it all the more surprising that she is often overlooked.” These sympathetic comments raise an interesting point. In terms of a national audience, O’Faolain’s work is clearly written into a psychic terrain that could not be anything but Irish. But is it legible as such? And if not, why not?

At the back of this book is an afterword; the answer may be there. “My early stories,” O’Faolain writes, “focus on the trip wires of class and cruelty, as seen through a child’s eyes in our local village . . . When I travelled, lived abroad and wrote about that, the stories grew kinder – not, however, as kind as my father’s. He was fond of his characters, whereas I was more impatient of mine and more detached. The fact that he often forgave their foolishness showed that he was fond of Ireland itself, where he lived for most of his life. I instead left it and found I was happier elsewhere.”

Instructive differences

O’Faolain and her father are very different writers. The differences are instructive, not just of style but of a literary moment. Both are ironists. But Seán O’Faolain was a romantic ironist. His daughter is a far bleaker version of that sensibility. While he could offer escape to his readers, zigzagging with grace from the lives of the Great O’Neill and Daniel O’Connell to a microportrait of a quarrelling couple, his daughter has a sterner project. Her stories are not about escape; they are about what is inescapable.

The title story of her first, remarkable collection from 1968 is included here. It signs in for many others. We Might See Sights! sets out the furniture of estrangement as it appears in many of her stories: a claustrophobic Irish village; a girl growing awkwardly into puberty; a mother sending her daughter to the pub for cigarettes. There is a boy who is slow and vulnerable, and a scene of sexual discovery at the end that borders on the grotesque. "Rereading the early stories in my first collection," she remarks in the afterword, "is, I find, like making a trip to a now defunct Ireland."

But the Ireland of these stories is not defunct. It can't be: it is not a timebound terrain. From Under the Rose, the title story of this collection, in which a self-deceiving lothario is tracked through his affairs and delusions, to Daughters of Passion, in which a woman hunger striker fears a different delusion, place operates more as allegory than actuality.

O’Faolain is not a literal writer. Her men and women are sketched and sometimes caricatured with a lyrical bitterness. She is a superb stylist, laying bare uncomfortable truths in many of the situations. Her presentation of character is often radical in its lack of sentimentality.

Going from story to story in this book, therefore, a reader is able to feel a keen pleasure in this gallery of misfits and the bright adjectival originality they come to life with. The main character in The Knight, for instance, to take just one example, has a face "of bright meaty red", a face that "looked healthy enough on the bicycling priests who abounded in his family but on him wore a congested gleam". This is one aspect of these fictions. The characterisation of women is another matter, but an important one.

In 1980 O'Faolain published a novel called No Country for Young Men. It wove together two eras and two families – the O'Malleys and the Clancys – exploring Irish identity and violence across both entities. It was received with enthusiasm, found a wide readership and was nominated for the Booker Prize. Julian Moynahan, reviewing the later American publication in the New York Times in 1987, wrote: "Julia O'Faolain in her bitter, comprehensive realism has produced a book that has few if any parallels in contemporary Irish fiction and that must be read by all who care about 'that country' as it really is."

He also referred in the same review to the fact that “an important secondary theme is the oppression and unequal status of Irish women, a condition crossing all classes of society”.

Women's experiences have occurred and recurred as a motif in O'Faolain's fiction. While in no sense a traditional feminist, in Under the Rose she returns to the lives, encounters and setbacks of her female characters with a dark, inventive pessimism. In a key story in the book, The Corbies' Communion, an ageing and distinguished man, his wife recently dead, doesn't take any care to hide his misogyny from his daughter as he tells her he has a new companion. "'She's nobody,' he told Kitty. 'Just someone to talk to. I have to have that. I don't even find her attractive.'"

Female characters

O'Faolain follows the various journeys of her female characters with care and convincing detail. The vignettes of dismissal and abstraction, the descriptions of women compliant with their own diminishment – such as Teresa in The Religious Wars of 1944 and Phyllis in Under the Rose, as well as Maggy, the indecisive hunger striker in Daughters of Passion – add up to a harsh and unsettling portrait.

All of which raises a key point. O'Faolain is a continuously persuasive writer, but not, it seems, always an approachable one. And why? The answer, it seems, is surely in this collection, and it is entirely to her credit. In these memorable stories, Julia O'Faolain is ready and willing to explore, to examine, to reach for comedy and engage in feats of style. Willing, in other words, to complete many of the tasks of the fiction writer, except one. She is never willing, under any circumstances, to flatter. Not the society, not the subject matter and not the reader. If her characters are powerless, as they often are, she is plainly determined not to offer, on any account, that power over them to her reader. And so she resists even the secondary flatteries common in so much contemporary writing: the promising and reassuring, the reflexive return to optimism on cue. There are many reasons to admire Under the Rose, but this, above all, is what makes this collection so clearly the essential work of an essential writer.

Eavan Boland's latest collection is A Woman without a Country (Carcanet Press)