In The Forest

Edna O'Brien

When it was published last year In The Forest caused the kind of stink which must have had its publishers rubbing their hands together with glee. Count me in as one reader who probably wouldn't have come across it without last year's controversy.

It's a novel, sort of (we'll come to that), which describes a young tearaway thug, O'Kane, recently released from youth detention who terrorises his local community in rural Ireland. In the course of the book we learn enough of O'Kane's sad history to, well, if not understand and sympathise, then at least partly to penetrate his own personal pain and madness. Even so, O'Kane is a demonic figure, and a newcomer to the area, Eily Ryan, makes the mistake of showing him a small kindness and this gives him the excuse to latch onto her. When Eily, her small son, and the local priest to boot, go missing, the authorities belatedly take action to hunt down the outlaw.

The novel is based heavily on the real life murders of Imelda Riney, her three year old son and Father Joe Walshe in Co. Galway in 1994. Brendan O'Donnell was convicted of their murders and jailed for life. Hence the stink from outraged locals who accuse Edna O'Brien of cashing in on the tragedy and misrepresenting crucial details.

Other reviewers have commented on its fairy tale qualities. O'Kane is the ogre, Eily Ryan a kind of princess or cinderella figure. Certainly she comes across as something of a free spirit. Her small son is the classic babe-lost-in-the-wood. But its dreamy tone never quite worked for me. There is one astonishingly good chapter entitled "Blow Lady Blow" which deals with a children's party gone sour and ends with Eily finding a crude note pinned to her windscreen and which packs a whole novel's worth of menace into four pages, but too much of the rest of the book is a drag.

The obvious comparison is with Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy. Same Irish setting and a similar mad, bad protagonist. But In The Forest is the inferior read and by a wide margin.