It has become a ritual. Another new novel published, another round of interviews about her life, the way she looks, her gestures, her accent, her Irishness and the debate which it invariably inspires as to whether it is real or merely a theatrical version. Shrewd and observant, Edna O'Brien is nothing if not practical and is well aware of the way some view her. Far from being either a career romantic or a jolly eccentric oblivious to opinion, she is a natural writer, unabashedly in love with words and open-eyed, while remaining more amused than defensive about the mixed critical standing she holds.
She is also very funny. Although she first moved to England more than 40 years ago, her rich, performer's voice retains a strong Clare accent, she knows how to use both to effect. O'Brien elevates a reading to a daring, compelling performance and has often caused listeners to return to work they had felt they already knew. Not surprisingly she has written for the stage. Our Father, which she describes as "a tale about family strife" and revolves upon the brutal taking over of a family home, will open next month in London in a production directed by Lynne Parker. "I am a writer who happens to be a woman," says O'Brien. "I am not a victim. I get hurt and wounded. But for all its loneliness, writing is a wonderful occupation." It is also the one her elder son Carlo adopted. Her new novel, Wild Decembers, is the final part of her modern Ireland trilogy which began with House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which the central character finds her home taken over by an IRA man on the run. The second volume Down By The River (1997), is based loosely on the X Case and set out to explore the savagery of Irish sexuality and the hypocrisy it has always inspired. After politics and sex, the new book takes on the third, and probably greatest of Irish obsessions, land ownership.
Often accused of no longer knowing the Ireland she continues to write about, O'Brien counters this by saying "I do a lot of research. I set out to find out everything, far more than I need to know. I went home and asked questions. I now know everything there is to know about tractors." She mentions one exasperated neighbour who finally reached the stage of saying, "but I've told you everything I know about tractors". She laughs at the memory of it and then adds "But you also find out other things; you hear stories." She is a persistent individual as well as a compulsive writer, admitting she has to know everything. "I keep listening, keep hearing, keep seeing."
For all her friendliness she seems to have few illusions and says "I anger people by my intensity. But I do like to shake them, give them a wallop." It sounds a bit blunt; certainly there is a part of O'Brien which likes to shock - her books contain desperate longing, violence, emotional cruelty, death, even murder, but she is also subtle about it. Her writing has always attempted to present an honest, and therefore not always popular, view of human behaviour. These are the messes we make, this is how we live, these are the hurts.
Her first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960 - a long time ago, almost in another time. It made her famous. Its sequel two years later, The Girl With Green Eyes, (first published as The Lonely Girl) was dedicated to her former husband, Ernest Gebler, who died last year. By 1964, life and reality had finally caught up with O'Brien's likeable young heroines: bookish, dreamy Kate and her more earthy pal, Baba, in Girls In Their Married Bliss. Aside from the fame and the infamy, that first trilogy also caused some to view her as an Irish Colette, even down to the fact that Gebler, whom she divorced, claimed to have written them. The mention of Colette causes O'Brien to laugh. "She has more logic than me; she was French." As for the disputed authorship, those early books are written in the same authorial style which O'Brien has used throughout her long career.
With 14 novels and six collections of short stories, O'Brien is a serious writer with a substantial body of work and is not the first Irish writer to be either banned or far more valued abroad than at home - and she has been both. In 1995 she received the European Prize for Literature in recognition of her life's work. If the criticism she has received over the years had been more balanced, her admirers would probably feel less inclined to defend her.
A few years ago, Thomas Kilroy, when introducing an O'Brien reading at the Cuirt Festival in Galway, embarked on a passionate defence of a writer whose worth had not been fully grasped at home. Kilroy was applauded, and O'Brien gave an atmospheric performance, cleverly linking her selected passages with a few explanatory words, and succeeded in giving a sense of an entire novel in an hour.
Kilroy was right - in Ireland she remains the glamorous, wayward runaway who fled with an older man at 19 and as a writer exposed Ireland long before the current scandals began dismantling the myths. Her work is as important as social history as is that of her near contemporary John McGahern. Had any other writer written Night (1972), a night-time monologue in which one woman revisits her past, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece. On the strength of that performance alone, O'Brien's literary reputation is assured and further endorsed by A Pagan Place (1970) and any number of short stories.
But no one knows better than she does that opinion is invariably divided as to whether she is a great character or a colourful self-invention. The difficulty with her is that she is a determinedly literary woman, a person who lives in her mind. Her conversation is grounded in literature, her responses invariably draw on a store of quotation and cross references. Interestingly, apart from her obvious love of Joyce, she refers to Russian writers far more frequently than she does to Irish ones. Much has been made of the fact that at home she surrounds herself with flowers and candles. This has been linked with her Catholic upbringing and convent education, rather than allowing her the fact that she simply happens to like flowers.
It is a dull Thursday, and her small London drawing-room-cum-study is dominated by tall, white lilies. A scented candle burns. "I had a flood. There's a leak over there," she points to the fireplace wall. "I hope it's fixed. But it has left the place a bit musty, the dampness, you know." Later, when it begins to rain she looks worried and says, "I hope that repair holds".
The books on her shelves have continued to increase and multiply. Pride of place at the moment is a copy of Robert Fagles's translation of The Odyssey and a volume of Akhmatova's poetry. O'Brien brings a plate of cheese, tea and a large Italian cake up the narrow stairs from the kitchen.
At present her younger son, Sasha, an architect, is working on building her a house in Donegal. It will be the first she has ever owned. "It is strange, though, that you never realise how expensive it is to build a house until you do it."
There is no doubting that she is a woman most women can't help liking and men, unless they are intimidated by her literary conversation, are charmed by. Charm is also second nature to her, but she is a strong person. She wears high-heeled boots and a long plain dress; her hair is casually styled and of her person in general, she says matter-of-factly, "I do a few exercises", and demonstrates by thrusting her arms up and down. No matter how well she looks in photographs, invariably dramatically serious, almost soulful, the vivid reality of O'Brien's face is never captured. Its strength lies in its great humour and earthy smile. She says she is not bitter and she couldn't be - there is not a trace of it in her lively expression. Her blue-grey eyes are not green either. "I know," she says and laughs. It is pointless asking her about age or the business of growing older. She waves the question away and says, "let's not talk about that".
Although the new novel is important to her ("I'm a novelist"), the book of the moment still appears to be her short life of Joyce. She speaks about the homework that went into it. While it has no index, there is a list of sources which appear under an unusual heading "in order of author preference" and first is Ellmann's biography of James Joyce. In writing her book for a new series of Lives by various writers which includes studies on Mozart and Proust, O'Brien not only engaged with one of her literary heroes, she also collected some scalding reviews attacking her for inaccuracy. "It's not supposed to be an academic book. Those have been written - it is my response to a master. All roads lead to Joyce," she says, and no one could doubt the sympathy she brings to the book.
One of the few stories she tells about the writing of it happened during the final stages. She was in a hotel room in New York trying to put final page proofs in order. "They were covering the floor." A friend, Philip Roth, arrived and looking at the clutter remarked to her, "the made-up stuff is easier"
Still no one, not even Edna O'Brien, could succeed in making a likeable character. Of the many things about him which have struck her is the fact "after she died, he never mentioned his mother again, I thought that very strange". Despite her fondness for Joyce, O'Brien leaves the reader in no doubt as to his coldness, self-obsession and flair for casual cruelty. She feels he redeems himself, however, by his obvious helpless love for his doomed daughter, Lucia.
In the book she asks the question "Do writers have to be such monsters in order to create?" and immediately answers, "I believe that they do. It is a paradox that while wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glisteningly depict. There can be no outer responsibility, no interruptions, only the ongoing inner drone, rhythmic, insistent, struggling to make a living moment of both beauty and austerity." Naturally, no book written about Joyce at this stage could realistically hope to reveal anything new about him. Probably the real value of her study is that it presents a writer engaging with a mentor. In it she also stresses "Language is the hero and heroine, language in constant fluxion and with a dazzling virtuosity." Ironically, language is the very point upon which so many of her readers are divided, the lush lyricism of her more recent books tends to either seduce or repel. This lyricism is usually drawn from images of the natural world. For a woman who grew up on an east Clare farm but has since spent so much time in cities, she has never lost touch with nature. "History is everywhere," she states at the beginning of House of Splendid Isolation. "It seeps into the soil, the subsoil. Like rain, or hail or snow, or blood. A house remembers." Then the sting: "A people ruminate. The tale differs with the teller." It is an ambitious novel and the strongest of the trilogy, and yet it is the one for which she has been most severely criticised. Some saw it as an apology for the IRA, a reading which she dismisses as ridiculous.
Extreme situations have always fascinated her. If her work to date may be divided into three movements, it is that the early fiction is rooted in her own experience as a woman; she describes girls in love with love and girls suffering the reality of their dreams. Those books also have fine comic set pieces, and O'Brien is very good on the sheer awkwardness of youth.
The novels of the middle period such as August is a Wicked Month (1965), Casualities of Peace (1966) or Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977) are darker and chronicle self-destructive women with failed marriages, women who have lost their children as well as their sense of self. Few writers have written as astutely of the humiliation women suffer in relationships, particularly when involved with married men. The more recent fiction is less personal - it is about looking at Ireland - an Ireland her critics say she does not understand but one which she says she has never lost either sight or feel of. "I go there all the time. I read the papers, books about Ireland. I listen, I ask, I talk, I know what's happening. Ireland is what I have always written about. It is what I know. I have never tried to write about things I know nothing of."
While she appears to be far warmer than many writers, judging from the often viciously accurate observations in her books, particularly by women of other women, she misses little. One minute dreamy and romantic quoting Chekhov, the next bringing the conversation back to the point.
If women emerge as victims in her books, it is probably because life often makes them so. But there is far more to her writing than stories of solitary women seeking a fulfilment which can only be won with a man. At present she is alone and says, "I have been for a long time". She is also quick to say, "I have always written, unless there was a problem . . . with some man or other."
There was a long gap. Between 1977 and 1989, there was no novel. The High Road, the story of three unhappy women, marked an uneasy return. In common with William Trevor, O'Brien is a writer of more range than she is often credited with. The best of her work may ultimately be found in the short stories. When compiling The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (1993), Dermot Bolger chose wisely in selecting the powerful story Such a Sky (From Lantern Slides, 1990), in which a woman visits her old and difficult father in a rest home and not only relives her past with him but also comes to terms with the self she has become.
"If the country girls in their summer dresses glimmered like icons trapped in a vanished past," noted Bolger in his introduction, "the closing section of Girls in Their Married Bliss, where Kate - the trilogy's heroine - has herself sterilised in an expensive London clinic, was a far greater landmark and years ahead of itself in Irish writing."
It has remained her problem: too honest, too angry, too raw and uncomfortable on occasion in its excess, extremes and lyric melodrama, O'Brien's writing has suffered for being ahead of its time. But she refuses to complain. "Ireland may have cost me a few sleepless nights, but it has given me a lot as well."
Wild Decembers by Edna O'Brien is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (£16.99 in UK)
