Down By The River

Rosaries and ovaries, I don't know which does the most damage to this country.

After recently finishing the newly released The Little Red Chairs, I promised myself I'd read some more Edna O'Brien, and now that I'm through with Down by the River from 1998, I'm not much closer to having a coherent opinion of her work: once again, the writing itself is gorgeous and masterful, and once again, I think that O'Brien has gotten lost in her own agenda; losing me in the process. They say that hard cases make bad law, but as this book proves, bad law also makes hard cases: in a country like Ireland where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, it's not difficult to present an extreme case that makes such a law seem absurd and cruel. But by using an extreme case, I think that O'Brien forfeits the opportunity to illustrate a nuanced position or persuade readers to her point-of-view (which I assume is her objective?); she's preaching to the choir here and failing to reach the uncommitted; the book feels somehow unsuccessful. Spoilers from here.

Immediately, we meet Mary and her father, going for a walk into the hidden reaches of their rural property in West Ireland:

Ahead of them the road runs in a long entwined undulation of mud, patched tar and fjords of green, the grassy surfaces rutted and trampled, but the young shoots surgent in the sun; flowers and flowering weeds in full regalia, a carnival sight, foxglove highest and lordliest of all, the big furry bees nosing in the cool speckled recesses of mauve and white bell. O sun. O brazen egg-yolk albatross; elsewhere dappled and filtered through different muslins of leaf, an after-smell where that poor donkey collapsed, died and decayed; the frame of a car, turquoise once; rimed in rust, dock and nettle draping the torn seats, a shrine where a drunk and driven man put an end to himself, then at intervals rubbish dumps, the bottles, canisters, reading matter and rank gizzards of the town riff-raff stowed in the dead of night.

This kind of writing – a bit rambling and lyrical, even when describing garbage – is absolutely to my taste, and O'Brien employs an even more gestural/stream-of-consciousness style to describe the first time that Mary is raped by her father down by the river (I don't mean to be abrupt with that, but it happens for the first time on page four).

It does not hurt if you say it does not hurt. It does not hurt if you are not you. Criss-cross waxen sheath, uncrissing, uncrossing. Mush. Wet, different wets. His essence, hers, their two essences one. O quenched and empty world. An eternity of time, then a shout, a chink of light, the ground easing back up, gorse prickles on her scalp and nothing ever the same again and a feeling as of having half-died.

On the opposite page, O'Brien telegraphs that this act will have far-reaching consequences:

In the City far away men of bristling goatee beards, men of serious preoccupied countenances, move through the great halls, corporeal figures of knowledge and gravity, the white of their wigs changing colour as they pass under the rotunda of livid light, ribs of yellow hair, smarting, becoming phosphorescent, powerful men, men with a swagger, a character personified by the spill of the gown or the angle of a coiffed wig, their juniors a few paces behind them laden with briefs and ledgers, the whole paraphernalia of the law in motion, some already at the bench, others walking slowly to the appointed courts, men of principle who know nothing of the road or the road's soggy secret will one day be called to adjudicate upon it, for all is always known, nothing is secret, all is known and scriven upon the tablet of time.

That's a lot to have happen within the first five pages of a book, and immediately, the various camps with their views on abortion are drawn. In what I found to be an out-of-nowhere scene, neighbouring women have a social meeting with the town priest and a visiting anti-abortion evangelist; a young woman named Roisin who demands everyone present not avert their eyes from a photo of a butchered and bloody fetus. When these women of good faith attempt to bring up arguments for abortion access, Roisin shoots them down. What about in the case of rape? “An abortion won't unrape her, all an abortion will do is compound the crime.” And what of incest? “Oh, the incest tosh...It is sad, of course, but there can be no exceptions.” In a country that will countenance no exceptions, Mary will soon seek one.

The first time Mary becomes pregnant by her father, he digs it out of her with a broken broom handle (very similar to a scene in The Little Red Chairs), and that had me squirming and resistant to reading further. After Mary's mother dies and she's forced to leave her boarding school and return home, and after a failed attempt at running away, the nearly fourteen-year-old girl discovers she's pregnant again and goes to a neighbour woman for help. Once she twigs onto the incest, Betty flies Mary off to England for an abortion, but they are ordered to return to Ireland by the alerted authorities; men of good faith who are sworn to uphold the law, but privately, rather wish that Mary had gone through with the abortion anyway and save them the trouble of a public hearing on her rights; a hearing bound to polarise the entire country. While waiting for Mary's hearing, the pro-lifers are all rabidly adamant that it's hellfire for Mary if she goes through with it and the pro-choice side is populated with gentle and understanding people who are willing to break a bad law in order to save an innocent's psyche. Roisin and her bloody pictures make a reappearance and a policeman's mistress asks why he would send her over to England to end her own pregnancies but thwart the victim of incest; righteous anti-choicers send Mary hate-filled letters and one of the presiding judges has trouble explaining to his own daughter why upholding the law is the greater good; there are no shades of grey in this narrative: the people who would force the innocent victim to carry the product of incestuous rape to term are either religious zealots or people who have their hands bound by their position, often in conflict with their private beliefs. And then the ending pulls the rug out from any argument O'Brien might have been building: just as the verdict is about to be announced on the news, Mary miscarries. So, what's the point?

I shared long passages of O'Brien's writing because I find her words to be so beautiful, but once again, I'm dissatisfied with her overall product. As an aside, I googled to see if Ireland's abortion laws have changed in the past twenty years and I found this story about a 19-year-old woman in Northern Ireland (and this was a surprise to me since Northern Ireland is a part of the UK and I would have assumed they'd have more liberal laws) who was recently criminally charged with ordering drugs online to cause her miscarriage when she couldn't afford to travel to England to end her pregnancy. That's a much more nuanced case, and in my opinion, an idea more worthy of a literary treatment. Yet again, I'm not against looking for more of Edna O'Brien's writing.