The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien

 One of the attractions of the Bargain Book Table is that it sometimes entices me to read authors I’ve never got around to reading, but who I feel I should have read. Edna O’Brien is one of those authors. When I saw one of her later novels, The Little Red Chairs on the bargain table sometime last year  I automatically picked it up, and after reading the blurb on the back, I was intrigued enough to decide it might be time to rectify my omission.

Having finally got around to reading it, I’ve been struggling to get to the bottom of what I felt about this book until I remembered a conversation I had with my older brother many, many years ago (as in the 1980s years ago). We had rented One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on VHS from the local video store (ah remember VHS!). I’d seen the film before and read the book, but my brother hadn’t. At the end (oh god, that ending…) I remember asking my brother what he thought of it. After a pause he said that he thought it was a brilliant film, but… he really hated it. And that is more or less how I feel about The Little Red Chairs.

First a bit about the plot. It starts when a mysterious stranger arrives in a small Irish community seeking shelter. The man, who says he is from Montenegro, calls himself a faith healer and after initial suspicion he is accepted by at least most of the locals. Of course, there is discord because the point of putting a mysterious stranger in the middle of a fairly insular community is to create discord and provocation, otherwise there would be no story. The main discord comes in the form of the relationship between our stranger and Fidelma McBride, who is entranced by his exoticism and believes he can give her a longed-for child she’s been unable to conceive within her marriage. From here tragedy and trauma unfold that will ripple through the entire village.

I have to say Edna O’Brien is a masterful writer and I was really involved with the first part of the book as our stranger seduces both literally and metaphorically. But there are undertones and whispers that he is not what he seems – a local hotel worker who is a refugee from the Balkans is traumatized when he sees the stranger having dinner in the hotel. There’s his constant fear of being photographed and occasional violent impulses coming to the surface that whisper of greater violence in the past as mentions of Srebrenica start to appear. It’s at this point I began to get uneasy. I usually read in bed, but the echoes of the news coverage on the horrors of the Balkan war began to poke at me and I found I couldn’t settle when it came time to turn off the light and I started reading the story during the day. I have to say it’s a testament to the power of the writing and the skill of the author as a storyteller that she could make me feel that way. (It’s funny that I can read someone like Stephen King with impunity before bed, but this story made me not want to close my eyes.)

The echoes of violence in the past are one thing, but when one piece of shocking and sickening violence erupts in the here and now I nearly put the book down and it was only the hope that there was restitution that made me continue with my daylight reading.

Most of the second half of the book deals with the results of that violence. Of what it is like to be both a victim and an outcast and how you build a life when you live in the twilight world where people refuse to acknowledge your existence and how it is almost impossible to articulate what happened to you for fear of being accused of being complicit in the creation of your own trauma. There’s really good commentary in this section about the invisible nature of refugees who almost seem to occupy a parallel space to the ‘real world’ where they see but are not seen.

There is a short third part to the book which I suppose is meant to bring at least some small degree of resolution if not restitution and while there is one completely joyous scene, I was left feeling pretty empty at the end. The book deals with deception and self-deception, with the lies people tell themselves to justify their action and the lengths that people will go to, to defend themselves from the real or imagined threats of others. For me it was a book all about the ‘Other’ – the interloper, the refugee, the people who don’t look or think or worship like you and what an individual or an entire population will do to keep the ‘Other’ at bay.

These are all huge topics and worthy of a writer’s time, so why am I comparing my reaction to my brother’s when he watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?  There are plaudits galore both on the back cover and the first few pages from most of the broadsheets and they are right to praise the quality of Edna O’Brien’s achievement as a writer because The Little Red Chairs is a superbly written book. A writer should also provoke and here she gets another tick in the box.  But for all that, the bottom line is that I didn’t enjoy it. I’m not against been made uncomfortable and being challenged by my reading material – there is always an element of risk and reward when you start a new book, but in this case the rewards didn’t outweigh the risks because the whisper and threat of violence made me twitchy and the actual explosion of violence made me want to put the book down. In the end I only finished this book out of a stubborn need not to put it away half read, and at that point the author lost me.

To paraphrase my brother many years ago – I thought The Little Red Chairs was a brilliantly written book, but… I hated it

The question now is, if I see another Edna O’Brien on the Bargain Book Table will I take a chance or not? I’d like to think I would because just like you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I shouldn’t judge an author with such a sterling reputation on the strength of one book. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, but in the meantime there are far too many other books on my shelves waiting to be read.

 

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien was first published in 2015 and my copy was published by Faber and Faber.