On the 6th of April 2012, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces, 11,541 red chairs were laid out in rows along the 800 meters of the Sarajevo high street. One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425 days of siege. Six hundred and forty-three small chairs represented the children killed by snipers and the heavy artillery fired from the surrounding mountains.From the title of The Little Red Chairs and the epigraph above, it should come as no surprise that, while this book is initially set in the west Ireland village of Cloonoila, there will be a link to the Bosnian War of the 1990s. When a mysterious white-haired foreigner walks into town and opens an alternative healing clinic, only the schoolteacher warns that even Rasputin entered the Russian Court in the garb of a monk, but the other residents will hear none of it; they are entranced by Vladimir Dragan and his herbs and crystals. I found this opening to be incredibly intriguing, definitely well-written, and provocative, and then...the book becomes something else; something I could no longer engage with. Reading reviews, I can see that authors like Lisa Moore in The Globe and Mail and Joyce Carol Oats in The New York Times both use the words “genius” and “masterpiece” – each marvelling that writing techniques that shouldn't work, do (as in Dragan, early on, having a dream that lays out exactly who he actually is and what role he played in the Siege of Sarajevo) – and while these authors are likely recognising some arcane technical achievements particular to their craft, I can only react to what is on the page, and in the end, this book left me cold. Spoiler-full from here.
Long afterwards there would be those who reported strange occurrences on that same winter evening; dogs barking crazily, as if there was thunder, and the sound of the nightingale, whose song and warblings were never heard so far west. The child of a gipsy family, who lived in a caravan by the sea, swore she saw the Pooka Man coming through the window at her, pointing a hatchet.The Little Red Chairs is divided into three parts. In the first, Dragan appears one winter's evening, and after a slow acclimatising, his clinic becomes the place to be: attracting nuns and housewives alike as the repressed seek release under his knowing hands. Fidelma – the town beauty who is desperate for a baby after losing the two pregnancies she conceived with her much older husband – begs Dragan to impregnate her, and after initially demurring, he eventually consents to an affair. Just as Fidelma's pregnancy is beginning to show, Dragan is recognised as a fugitive war criminal and arrested. Immediately, some of his old enemies abduct Fidelma, and in a horrifying scene, root out her pregnancy with a crowbar. Fidelma survives the assault, but unable to bear the judgement of her husband and neighbours, she flees to London. So far, I was totally intrigued by the story.
In part two, Fidelma must live the life of a refugee: accepting charity housing and working as a night cleaner alongside the other “ghosts” who have fled to London from war-torn homelands. She also attends a support group for refugee women, and here she hears horrifying stories of rape and murder and female genital mutilation. When she loses her cleaning job, Fidelma is given the opportunity to work temporarily at a greyhound rescue out in the countryside – and since in the Acknowledgments at the end, Edna O'Brien thanks such a rescue centre for allowing her repeated visits, this must have more significance than I could parse – and while there, Fidelma takes a room in the home of a man who tells her about his dead wife's time in a mental hospital.
In part three, Fidelma travels to The Hague, where the war crimes trial against Dragan – revealed to have been the Butcher of Bosnia – is in closing arguments, and after watching her former lover defending himself in the courtroom, she is granted an audience with him. Fidelma is looking for an explanation or a show of pity for the attack she had suffered, but Dragan is focussed only on himself, and she leaves without satisfaction. Fidelma returns to Cloonoila and her presence shocks her husband unto death. She then returns to London, where she takes more of a leadership role with the refugees at the women's centre, and the book ends with an amateur mounting of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I hate him, I want to inflict every punishment on him, including taking his voice, his voice box out, and strangling it syllable by syllable. I want the three men pulped, I hate myself and my own body, I think only violence will end the violence. This hate fills my heart, my soul and my being. When I menstruate, I want to rub my face in it to add to the defilement. You see, I have lost all connection between what is natural and what is unnatural. I hear the stories of the other women in that room, fates far harder than mine, excruciating, and I am moved, but I am not moved enough to stamp out the hate that is strangling me.Like I said, I found the first part – with Dragan and Fidelma and the village of Cloonoila – to have been fascinating and suspenseful: the reader knows who the healer really is, and despite a couple of close calls, his cover seems to be impregnable. When Fidelma moves to London, however, the plot appears to become merely a device for sharing pages-long stories of atrocities from around the world. And then, even though Fidelma is able to confront Dragan again before the book ends, I felt no more closure than she did, and I ended dissatisfied; I honestly have no idea how this book is meant to hang together. It will probably win the Booker this year.
I hadn't read Edna O'Brien before and I will definitely go back for more: the writing – the words – was lovely. As a side note, the same week that this book was released here, the actual Butcher of Bosnia, Radovan Karadžić, was convicted of war crimes in The Hague and sentenced to forty years in prison. Looking into him, I learned that O'Brien's portrayal was faithful to his actual experience; right down to the crystals and sex therapy and his flowing white hair tied up in a topknot. For a taste of his flight (and the bizarre efforts to hunt him down) have a look here. As for this book, it must have went over my head somehow, and as a result, it was just okay in my inexpert opinion.
