Product Description

IN THE FOREST, set in the west of Ireland, is the story of a young man who shoots dead three people in a forest glade. The young man, Mich O'Kane, is 'not all there in the head' as one character puts it. By puberty he is already committing petty crimes, ending up in borstal. By the time he is back home he has also served time in a British jail and is an institutionalised criminal. His sexual fantasies - revolving around women in the village - eventually centre on Eily, an artist and single mother, who lives with her son Maddie. One day Mich pounces, and orders Eily to drive them to the woods nearby...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116659 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Irish novelist Edna O'Brien is again the centre of controversy with her latest novel In the Forest. Forty years ago her first six novels were banned but times have changed.

She also wrote The Country Girls in 1962 and was vilified in Ireland. Taking as her subject matter the actual murders of a young mother, her toddler son and a priest in 1994 in County Clare, she is accused of exploiting grief, of gross insensitivity, of being motivated only by financial gain and of portraying Ireland as timeless and primitive. Her comeback is that "the novelist is the psychic and moral historian of his or her society. So it's about that part of Ireland I know very well...and the darkness that still prevails".

Not surprisingly this "true crime" novel makes for sombre and uncomfortable reading. O'Brien is unquestionably skilled at deploying language to create a highly charged atmosphere: even Cloosh Wood, where much of the action unfolds, takes on its own sinister personality where "the light [becomes] darker and darker into the chamber of non-light".

In tightly written chapters each with a change of narrator--the murderer himself, his sister and father, the murdered young woman, Eily Ryan, her sister, the priest, Father John, neighbours, the police--the effect is of accumulating tension and foreboding, despite our knowing (or because we know?) the terrible outcome. But in making the voices of her numerous characters so fragmented as to suggest a society in the grip of terror, O'Brien fails to make them resonate as individuals, except for the killer, the young psychotic, Mich.

Brutalised at home, abused by his priests and his peers, he becomes the feared "kindershcreck". In his late teens he is released from jail for a string of crimes, and returns to his old turf. Stalked by the brutality of his past, he in turn stalks Eily Ryan, a hippy-ish figure, living with her three-year-old son in a ramshackle cottage that Mich had seen as his own lair. Eily becomes to him "all-mothering, all-sinning. She-devil...Now the ultimate flood of rage that has been waiting is loosed from the wrenched and bloodied sockets of his fucked life as he tears her clothing in an ecstasy of hate, as though tearing limb from limb all womankind". With these terrible deaths and the hunting down of Mich, O'Brien suggests that the crimes are not Mich's alone: fear, bigotry, misogyny, repression and silence permeate the culture. And out of this, such evils come. --Ruth Petrie

Review
Sadly IN THE FOREST didn't make it onto the shortlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction but just to remind you though of the wonderful reviews the paperback has received so far: 'Edna O'Brien's thoughts have turned to tragedy of late - her startling new translation of Iphigenia premiered at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre recently, while this novel brings ancient Greek resonance to bear on a brutal multiple murder which rocked a small Irish community in 1994....... The manner in which she ushers her sacrificial victims to their fate hasthe harrowing inevitability one might expect from a writer who has spent a lot of time grappling with Aeschylus.THE GUARDIAN 'An absorbing and haunting novel.... never sensationalist, this is a considered study of a particularly shocking case.'THE SUNDAY TIMES 'this often frightening novel has a curiously timeless feel.'THE DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Despite the controversy that surrounded the publication of this book, O'Brien has created a tense yet senstively-written story, woven delicately with both mythology and modern sociological issues.'THE SUNDAY BUSINESS POST Edna will also be on BBC Radio's BOOKCLUB which will go out later in the year and her PEN lecture on Lampedusa's the Leopard ran

About the Author
Edna O'Brien is the author of 19 books. She was the winner of the 1993 Writers Guild Prize for Fiction. Her biography of James Joyce was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 1999. Her recent fiction has been about Irish topics - religion, politics, property. In 2001 her documentary novel, In the Forest - about a brutal murder on the west coast - caused a furore in her native Ireland. It was the subject of a BBC Omnibus film.

Customer Reviews

Really Powerful Piece
At a time when gory stories of police hunts of predictable killers abound, it is a literary event to read a 'thriller' that is truly memorable. O'Brien's use of real events to create a novel that is terrible and tragic, with a protagonist that is an understandably monstrous, almost fairy-tale bogeyman spawned by a society dark in violence and retribution, is a feat only the best of writers could accomplish. The forest itself, enduring image in fairy-tale and folklore, is a central symbol, lair of the outcast Mich and home to Eily, victim of his wrath against the forest of the world that, unable to cope with its demons, has rejected him. The writing is taut and controlled, yet powerful enough to take the reader into the heart of the horror, to recognise it and understand it. This novel should re-establish O'Brien as one of the best writers of this generation, and deserves the highest recommendation.

Kinderschreck.
A boy, robbed off his mother's love at the age of ten. Refusing to believe she is dead, clinging to the idea that she was buried alive while she was sleeping, digging a hole into the ground near her grave in order to speak to her. A loner who, then and there, decides to become "a true son of the forest," as his mother in a dream apparition has told him to be. (Or was that an early delusion?) An adolescent, locked up in juvenile homes, boarding schools, prisons and other institutions, abused by a priest, neglected, ignored, and locking himself off against the outside world in response. Putting to practice the one lesson he has learned from Lazlo, the boys' schizophrenic leader in the first such institution; Lazlo who heard voices and who has taught him that the one thing that counts is to hate "them" (the grown-ups, those that stand for authority and society as a whole) with a worse hate than they have for him. A young man, unable to show any feeling other than that long-practiced hatred; acting out his suppressed emotions in violence whenever he is not locked up, unable to escape the voices now talking in his head more and more often, just as they were once talking in Lazlo's.

And a young woman with long red hair. Maddie's mother, raising her young son alone, breaking off all relationships with men as soon as they get to close for comfort. An outsider, only recently moved to the village. A teacher. An artist. Mistress of ceremonies at a Celtic festival, performing pagan rituals. Druidess. Mystery woman whom nobody knows with complete intimacy, maybe not even her sister Cassandra and her best friend Madge. Raped and murdered by a young man trapped between insanity and emotional deprivation, for whom she is the realization of everything he associates with the idea of the female - simultaneously fairy queen, virgin, angel, object of his sexual fantasies, whore, confidante and most importantly, mother. This is the couple which, in the deadly dance at the heart of Edna O'Brien's "In the Forest," is locked together by fate; a fate prompted by the murderer's delusions and rage as much as by society's inability to deal with him. And this first murder is only the starting point of a killing spree which will demand several more victims before the young man is apprehended.

Like two of O'Brien's previous novels, "Down by the River" (addressing incest, abortion and society's inability to deal with either, as expressed in the trial of a girl who went to England to abort the child conceived from her own father) and "House of Splendid Isolation" (inspired by the Irish "troubles"), "In the Forest" is based on a series of real events which deeply shook the Irish society in the mid-1990s, and which occurred in the county which O'Brien, before moving to London, used to call her home. But here as there, the author is less interested in the hard, cold facts as such but rather, in the psychology involved and society's response to the unspeakable horror of the crimes committed; in "man and the intentions of his soul," as she once said in a newspaper article, quoting Leonardo da Vinci. And like the great painter, with an unrelenting eye for detail she takes the reader into the killer's mind; a mind inexorably spiraling, spiraling, spiraling into a dark abyss from which soon there is no way out. At the same time, the reader experiences the terror of the abduction felt by his victims; the slow and chilling realization that there is no escape, that this last walk into the somber depth of the forest is the way into certain death, to be preceded by a suffering dreadful beyond imagination. Yet, the tale is not solely told from the perspective of Michen O'Kane, the killer and rapist, the "Kinderschreck" and bogeyman who holds an entire county at gunpoint; nor only from that of his victims, Eily Ryan and her son, and the others that will follow them within a matter of days. Thread by thread, Ms. O'Brien weaves the voices of all those involved in the events - the vicitims' relatives, the killer's family, the police, neighbors, women of the community and the psychiatrist who treated O'Kane at trial - into a fabric of rage, helplessness, despair and desolation; symbolized by the vast, dark, threatening forest where the first murders have taken place, that "chamber of non-light" which "lost its old name and its old innocence in the hearts of the people" when a dead goat "decomposed and stank" in a wooden hut at the farthest entrance to the forest.

In her native Ireland, Edna O'Brien was severely criticized for "In the Forest," even before the novel was published, and accused of exploiting a gruesome crime for the sake of selling a story. The families of the victims of the incidents on which the novel is based reportedly spoke out against the book. But while it is undoubtedly difficult for them to deal with those events, the reaction of others only demonstrates the accuracy of Ms. O'Brien's analysis. Yet again, the woman who to many seems to be a literary "Kinderschreck" herself, whose first six (!) books were banned because of their daring stance on women's role in the Irish society (and society in general), and who moved to London years ago to "escape from those fields, gates, trees, woods, winds, sleet, priests, nuns and family, all of whom seemed to overwhelm [her]," as she wrote in the above-mentioned article, has held up a mirror before her fellow men; and yet again, some do not like what they see. That criticism, however, reflects more on those articulating it than on the author herself or her book. "In the Forest" is as brilliantly written as it is necessary - as shown by nothing better than by the reactions it provoked. A deeply disturbing book, but under no circumstances to be missed.

Kinderschreck.
A boy, robbed off his mother's love at the age of ten. Refusing to believe she is dead, clinging to the idea that she was buried alive while she was sleeping, digging a hole into the ground near her grave in order to speak to her. A loner who, then and there, decides to become "a true son of the forest," as his mother in a dream apparition has told him to be. (Or was that an early delusion?) An adolescent, locked up in juvenile homes, boarding schools, prisons and other institutions, abused by a priest, neglected, ignored, and locking himself off against the outside world in response. Putting to practice the one lesson he has learned from Lazlo, the boys' schizophrenic leader in the first such institution; Lazlo who heard voices and who has taught him that the one thing that counts is to hate "them" (the grown-ups, those that stand for authority and society as a whole) with a worse hate than they have for him. A young man, unable to show any feeling other than that long-practiced hatred; acting out his suppressed emotions in violence whenever he is not locked up, unable to escape the voices now talking in his head more and more often, just as they were once talking in Lazlo's.

And a young woman with long red hair. Maddie's mother, raising her young son alone, breaking off all relationships with men as soon as they get to close for comfort. An outsider, only recently moved to the village. A teacher. An artist. Mistress of ceremonies at a Celtic festival, performing pagan rituals. Druidess. Mystery woman whom nobody knows with complete intimacy, maybe not even her sister Cassandra and her best friend Madge. Raped and murdered by a young man trapped between insanity and emotional deprivation, for whom she is the realization of everything he associates with the idea of the female - simultaneously fairy queen, virgin, angel, object of his sexual fantasies, whore, confidante and most importantly, mother. This is the couple which, in the deadly dance at the heart of Edna O'Brien's "In the Forest," is locked together by fate; a fate prompted by the murderer's delusions and rage as much as by society's inability to deal with him. And this first murder is only the starting point of a killing spree which will demand several more victims before the young man is apprehended.

Like two of O'Brien's previous novels, "Down by the River" (addressing incest, abortion and society's inability to deal with either, as expressed in the trial of a girl who went to England to abort the child conceived from her own father) and "House of Splendid Isolation" (inspired by the Irish "troubles"), "In the Forest" is based on a series of real events which deeply shook the Irish society in the mid-1990s, and which occurred in the county which O'Brien, before moving to London, used to call her home. But here as there, the author is less interested in the hard, cold facts as such but rather, in the psychology involved and society's response to the unspeakable horror of the crimes committed; in "man and the intentions of his soul," as she once said in a newspaper article, quoting Leonardo da Vinci. And like the great painter, with an unrelenting eye for detail she takes the reader into the killer's mind; a mind inexorably spiraling, spiraling, spiraling into a dark abyss from which soon there is no way out. At the same time, the reader experiences the terror of the abduction felt by his victims; the slow and chilling realization that there is no escape, that this last walk into the somber depth of the forest is the way into certain death, to be preceded by a suffering dreadful beyond imagination. Yet, the tale is not solely told from the perspective of Michen O'Kane, the killer and rapist, the "Kinderschreck" and bogeyman who holds an entire county at gunpoint; nor only from that of his victims, Eily Ryan and her son, and the others that will follow them within a matter of days. Thread by thread, Ms. O'Brien weaves the voices of all those involved in the events - the vicitims' relatives, the killer's family, the police, neighbors, women of the community and the psychiatrist who treated O'Kane at trial - into a fabric of rage, helplessness, despair and desolation; symbolized by the vast, dark, threatening forest where the first murders have taken place, that "chamber of non-light" which "lost its old name and its old innocence in the hearts of the people" when a dead goat "decomposed and stank" in a wooden hut at the farthest entrance to the forest.

In her native Ireland, Edna O'Brien was severely criticized for "In the Forest," even before the novel was published, and accused of exploiting a gruesome crime for the sake of selling a story. The families of the victims of the incidents on which the novel is based reportedly spoke out against the book. But while it is undoubtedly difficult for them to deal with those events, the reaction of others only demonstrates the accuracy of Ms. O'Brien's analysis. Yet again, the woman who to many seems to be a literary "Kinderschreck" herself, whose first six (!) books were banned because of their daring stance on women's role in the Irish society (and society in general), and who moved to London years ago to "escape from those fields, gates, trees, woods, winds, sleet, priests, nuns and family, all of whom seemed to overwhelm [her]," as she wrote in the above-mentioned article, has held up a mirror before her fellow men; and yet again, some do not like what they see. That criticism, however, reflects more on those articulating it than on the author herself or her book. "In the Forest" is as brilliantly written as it is necessary - as shown by nothing better than by the reactions it provoked. A deeply disturbing book, but under no circumstances to be missed.