House of Splendid Isolation

The heart-breaking dilemmas and the noble and bloody history of Ireland come vividly to life in the tale of Josie, a widow living in a solitary house outside an Irish village, whose home becomes the hideout of an IRA terrorist.

History frames this ambitious, intermittently beautiful 14th novel by Irish spellbinder O'Brien (The Country Girls Trilogy). "History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil," begins the author, as the ghost of a dead child drifts in a garden, peering through the windows of a decaying country house. The story centers on a tormented encounter between young IRA fugitive/killer McGreevy and his hostage--rich, reclusive, middle-aged Josie O'Meara. Both have been widowed by the protracted "troubles." Josie, a former barmaid, who once did a stint as a domestic in Brooklyn, reminisces before and during her "captivity" on her advantageous but flawed marriage. Jamie--whose death she inadvertently caused--had been a landed man, a vulgar wastrel with a zest for horses and hard drink. Josie dreams nostalgically of the old bittersweet years in her stately lakeside house and her ardent affair with a priest (graphically betrayed by a corset left in the grass). Less successful are the novel's bristling, movie-like scenes of McGreevy tearing through the underbrush, clashing with comrades, eluding the fretful police. Josie's relationship with McGreevy proves oddly factitious and ideological (less vividly realized than her redolent past), while the tale's bizarre denouement is gratuitous. Powerful, however, is the elegiac voice on themes of womanly love, the tale's psychological acuity and the re-creation of a haunted landscape. In these respects, O'Brien still works her Celtic enchantments.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Irish-born O'Brien (who lives in London and has written emotionally intense, mordantly funny novels and short story collections like A Fanatic Heart, 1984) turns her attention to the continuing troubles in her native land--``a beautiful tragic country to be born into''--contemplating it through the eyes and hearts of a handful of characters entangled in a violent moment. Chief, and perhaps most intriguing, among these is Josie O'Meara, a widow, dessicating in the large West Country farmhouse to which her misogynistic husband brought her as a bride many years before. A stash of IRA guns hidden on the property and an anonymous note left on the doorstep of the Guarda brought about his death, though Josie hardly seems to have mourned, for her life with him was a bitter root. But when late one night her sleep is broken by an intruder who turns out to be an IRA terrorist popularly known as the ``mad beast,'' Josie shocks herself by warming to him, writing in her journal, ``I want before I die to be myself again.'' The captor, named McGreevy, and his increasingly willing hostage talk politics--for instance, how IRA guerillas often ``get the wrong men,'' peaceable, unaligned locals who happen to get in the way of a bullet or bomb blast (this is called ``the Paddy factor'')--and about their own lives. Unaccountably, he opens up, telling her of the wife and baby daughter he lost. Then he disappears to murder an English lord, come to the area to take his boat out on the lake. Josie lies to the authorities when they interrogate her about the fugitive, though they know it and stake out her house, expecting McGreevy to return. When he does, the novel's vicious climax unfolds in a lyric swell, through which a stern note sounds--about how ``the same blood and the same tears drop from the enemy as from the self.'' No answers here, of course, but well worth reading as O'Brien's first concentrated treatment of the troubles--and the pain they visit on the Irish people. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Over the years of her increasingly distinguished career, Irish novelist and short-story writer O'Brien has been, in the public mind, transformed from a naughty lady whose books were banned in her native country to a celebrated and serious specialist in the distresses of the female heart. In her latest novel, her signature theme of womanly love is worked out once more in her signature style--beautiful writing that cascades and pirouettes like the rollicking, invigorating rush of a mountain stream. Politics plays a strong role here, in the form of an IRA terrorist loose in the Irish Republic, searched for by the forces of law and scurrying under and around like an evasive rat. With a dual sympathy that gives this narrative its heart, O'Brien follows him as he locates a refuge in the house of an old woman whom he takes hostage; O'Brien backtracks and tells us the woman's story, and it's one of aloneness and heartbreak. Through their brief and tragic intersection, the reader sees both sides of the historical conflict. A splendid novel by a superb writer. Brad Hooper

"A man will come and a child will go out," says a gypsy girl to Josie some time after she first enters her husband's house, having returned to Ireland from America to marry him. The man who comes in is an IRA terrorist on the run from the police who invades Josie's house when she is living there alone as an old woman. The child had been lost to an abortion early in Josie's marriage, at a time when she could not cope with her uncouth husband and a life she had chosen in desperation. The two stories are deftly woven together by the remarkable O'Brien ( Time and Tide , LJ 4/1/92), who manages to sum up a century of Irish sorrow in this taut, lyrical novel, filled with scenes so vividly rendered they seem captured in a flash of lightning. Not the least of O'Brien's accomplishments is her ability to present both sides of the Irish problem in all their complexity without settling heavily on either side. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/94.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.