The best parts of The Little Red Chairs are good in the way I'm coming to expect Edna O'Brien to be good: communities of voices, a wealth of sharp, sumptuously rendered impressions of people and settings, a scope that can contain the minutiae of the local and the sweep of history, narration capable of switching smoothly from loving to combative and back again, relationships elucidated in all their messiness. Something that I haven't encountered before in her work until now and that can be added to the sizable list of what she does well is her unflinching handling of utter brutality on a mass scale, as remembered (or not) by those caught in the Bosnia-Serbia war of the 90s.
Years ago, someone I know said he didn't like No Country For Old Men, the film adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel by the Coen Brothers that is among my favorites of the crime genre. He argued that whatever the directors had to say was undermined by how they revelled in horror movie-style violence just to say it. For him, depictions of violence in art tend to be gratuitous, either too shocking and numbing to maintain a useful connection to the audience or deliberately so to get a cheap frisson. From time to time since then I've heard similar objections. In fact, just before beginning these notes, I read a review in the New York Times in which the writer compliments a novelist for refusing to show the terrible act of violence inflicted upon a group of women, thus preserving their dignity instead of turning them into props in a voyeuristic entertainment.
I wouldn't establish a rule one way or another. Restraint might be appropriate. On the other hand, those who've experienced or witnessed or been deeply haunted by accounts of acts of violence might seek to represent these memories with the same accurate immediacy as other, less grisly, memories. In this sense, readers or viewers don't have a right to disregard the idea of seeing it depicted. But they can judge the intent and quality of the depiction. Upon reflection, it may very well turn out to be cheap. Or it may simply be a mere fragment of reality, perhaps as felt by Syrians and Mexicans and the Rohingya and a long weary line of others.... As for the Times review, the dichotomy is proven false by, among other things, O'Brien's novel. In her telling, there is nothing entertaining about the act, nor is the victim, seen fully fleshed out in her Irish home beforehand, any less human, in the midst of it or in the aftermath.
I've encountered something similar in the most memorable scene of James Ross's Depression-era crime novel They Don't Dance Much. What cuts deepest isn't when the torturer puts a cigarette out in his victim's eye but a little later, when the victim, in a daze of immense pain, finally begs his torturer to have mercy and kill him. 1984 comes to mind too. Moments of human limits that succeed in disturbing.
A descent, in one line: "I began to believe I could breathe better dead than alive."
In the end, the novel, despite having excellent qualities, is mixed. For one thing, there are odd, rather prominent lapses. A character speaks in broken English yet uses words unlikely to be in the vocabulary of a fluent speaker, such as "suppurate" and "pulp" (in verb form). Another character helps advance the plot by doing something so stupid that it's an open question whether she could have really survived into adulthood to do it, though I admit I'm not prepared to say it's possible to capture the limits of human stupidity. Neither of the chapter-length dreams are convincing as dreams, with one, I'm startled to report in the case of so scrupulous a writer, ending with that classic twist: it was all a.... Finally, it could be argued that the conclusion she reaches is perfunctory.
A flawed response to Roberto Bolaño, perhaps, who's quoted for the book's epigraph. Her figure of evil, the war criminal Dr. Vlad Dragan (nicknamed "Vuk," which means "wolf"), could have stepped out of Nazi Literature in the Americas, reciting one of his poems in praise of bullets.
