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Book Review Ancient enmities in microcosm

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Joseph Hurley

WILD DECEMBERS, by Edna O’Brien. Houghton Mifflin. 257 pp. $24.

Utilizing the exquisitely polished prose style to which Edna O’Brien’s readers have long since become accustomed, "Wild Decembers" is made up of more than 60 brief chapters, some less than a page in length, and others in the form of a letter or a fragment of poetry.

The story the author is telling here takes place in rural Ireland in the middle 1970s. The event that triggers the plot of "Wild Decembers" is a subtle variation on a theme that dates back to the Greeks, namely the return of the native. The minor alteration O’Brien has invoked here is that Mick Bugler isn’t exactly returning to Ireland’s Western counties, and, in the technical sense, he isn’t even precisely a native. He is, in fact, the Australian-born son of a family that left Ireland in search of a new life below the equator.

Now, Mick has journeyed to the country of his parents’ birth, after some years of laboring on an Australian sheep station, intending to reclaim his family’s Irish farm holdings.

The small farm that lies next to Bugler’s property is held by a brother and sister, Joseph and Breege Brennan. The desolate mountain farm maintained by the Brennans could be in Galway or Clare, the counties O’Brien knows best. She has created a nearby village, Cloontha, which represents virtually all of the contact the Brennans have with the world beyond their mountain property.

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Brennans have tended this little farm for many generations, and for much of that time, waves of family members have regarded the Buglers with enmity, due to petty disputation over grazing rights and perhaps property lines.

Joseph and Breege live, as legions of Brennans before them have done, with the echoes of well-nurtured battles, the exact causes of which are no longer remembered with anything even remotely resembling clarity.

When Mick Bugler comes to the mountain, he brings with him a tractor that is very nearly a fourth major character in "Wild Decembers," and for a time it seems somewhat incredible that farms like the Brennan operation could have remained innocent of modern equipment.

The power of land to influence, shape and distort the lives of men and women living on it is an ancient theme in the literature of the world, and Ireland, despite or perhaps because of its relatively small size, is hardly an exception. More than once in the new novel, O’Brien writes of "fields that mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too."

Describing the mountain that holds his farm, Joseph Brennan says, "It’s God to me." Despite his feelings for his land, Joseph did, at one point in his youth, come close to leaving it. He had loved a local girl and, when she moved to the city to become a nurse, he very nearly went along. He was dissuaded from doing so by his mother, who feared that, should he leave, "their little farm would be chopped up, like in a butcher’s shop, different people getting different cuts, strangers crossing in front of the kitchen window."

So, another Irish bachelor was made, in part at least, by another loving Irish mother.

For her part, Breege never appears to have thought very much of the great world beyond the mountain. She has replaced her mother when it comes to maintaining and caring for her older brother, and that seems to satisfy her. If she even knows very much about the changes which had taken place in the lives of women by the time the story takes place, O’Brien keeps us in the dark about it.

In addition to the tractor, Mick brings a renewed physical vigor to the area, an energy that includes the sexual. O’Brien describes Mick as being "so eager to master his surroundings that he rarely used a gate or a stile, simply leapt over them."

At first, Joseph and Mick attempt a sort of friendship — Joseph, whose knowledge of the land extends, in ways, to an awareness of Ireland itself with which Mick, as an Australian, is unfamiliar.

When hostilities arise, they are the ancient ones. Who has the right to graze animals in a certain field? Who is permitted to cut peat in a particular bog?

Even Mick’s tractor becomes a sort of enemy. At first Joseph had thought in terms of acquiring one. Now he sees it as an element of evil, making noise that puts the birds off their song, though he can’t exactly explain why. "It’s stopping the birds singing," he says. "They don’t sing so sweetly anymore."

The real problems dividing Mick and Joseph begin to arise, however, when an unavoidable attraction blooms between Breege and the Aussie interloper.

O’Brien’s materials here are simpler, more primal than might be found in other, more complicated novels she has written, but, as always, she is masterly as she pursues her craft.

Everything beyond Mick, Joseph and Breege is kept very slightly in the background or a little to one side, even vaguely a touch out of focus, and this includes Rosemary, the fiancee Mick left behind in Australia, and who appears one day, uninvited, at the farm.

Cloontha is represented, in the main, by minor characters like a pair of sexually voracious sisters, Reena and Rita, who have become expert at blackmailing the men in the area, and Lady Harkness, the dominant local representative of the Protestant minority. And then there is Aziz, the small son of a South Indian family who have somehow found their way into the region, a child the kindly Breege has taken under her lonely wing.

In an Ireland so vastly changed, the redoubtable Edna O’Brien, famous for cutting relentlessly against the grain, has created a little clutch of characters for the most part untouched by time, and made them credible down to the last poignant, exasperating detail. This is, of course, precisely where one of the vast arcs of her awesome and enduring talent lies.

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