William Koon's Reviews > The Little Red Chairs

Edna O’Brien tackles some tough problems. One, she tries to make sense of the modern world. She does a great job –as she has in the past—in showing the Ireland she knew as bigoted, small, and repressive. (I read her aurobiography last year, The Country Girl and enjoyed it.) In this novel, she creates an almost clichéd cast of characters: the unsatisfied middle aged house wife, the boozy and friendly publican. There’s no whore with a heart of gold, but there is a nun with a heart of gold. Now there’s a switch.

Basically it’s about a Fidelma who fall in love with a military leader in disguise who has committed many atrocities, including in Sarajevo. (I think Wuthering Heights may be to blame for more bad novels that we could ever count.) He is captured. She is brutalized in an unforgiving way by enemies. (The rape by use of a crow bar not only is disturbing but also unbelievable. How could she have survived this violence since the reason was to rid her of her “love child?” Certainly it would have killed her.)

She then goes to London where she takes on menial jobs and meets some mighty fine folks and some bullies, too. She also works on a grey hound rescue farm. Then she attends the trial of her lover.

None of this matters much, but then she begins to get into her real theme: the problem of evil. And truth be told, Ms. O’Brien cannot handle the evil. She asks “Vlad,” “Was your essential nature always evil?” Thus she posits the idea that people are born good or bad, i.e. The Anne Frank Syndrome. She then confuses the issue by then asking if he has “chosen” the wrong part, allying him with a Satanic reasoning.

But gloriously it all disappears into a riotous version Midsuummer Night’s Dream back in London with that wacky bunch of immigrants and displaced persons she was hanging with, including a child, “Misteltoe,” who would have played several years ago by Quvenzhané Wallis. See, if we can make sense of that plot… .Ugh.

All in all, there are too many dream sequences, shifts of narrative, awkward transitions and dialogue to satisfy any serious reader. Or any reader for that matter. There’s just too much, “I could not go home until I could come home to myself” self-helpy clap trap sprinkled in the book, especially at the end.