A few months ago, when I reviewed The Skeleton Road by Val McDiermid, I mused a little on what it would take to put something horrific into your novel. The Skeleton Road had the Balkans conflict, and I used the word, albeit kindly, disrespectful to describe its inclusion. I don’t think I’ll use words like that to describe the inclusion of the Balkan conflict into The Little Red Chairs. There’s nuance here. The horror here doesn’t supplant character development. There is horror in this world, The Little Red Chairs says. And I don’t have to justify or relativasize or explain it to you. O’Brien is smart enough and trusts us enough not to need explanation. We can be confronted with it. She trusts us to do that.
I’ve only read O’Brien once before, The House of Splendid Isolation, which took me something like six tries to get past page twenty. I couldn’t see it with that book, but with this one, I can see why she is considered one of the greats. She takes apart the narrative, the point-of-view, the tense, like threads all placed next to each other. But instead of a jumble, it’s like an abstract painting you can’t turn away from. A car wreck. You can see it coming, the downfall. O’Brien doesn’t hide who Vuk is from the reader. He’s a wolf. He’s a criminal. He’s an exterminator of people. He exists as he is, without, as I said before, explanation or justification. Evil is there. How easy it is though, like Fidelma who starts an affair with Vuk when he arrives as an alternative healter in their sleepy Irish town, to see something different. It isn’t that Fidelma is willfully blind to her lover’s past. It isn’t that she knows but chooses not to. She just doesn’t know. But can you know someone though? Ever? Truly? Always? Does Fidelma know her husband Jack? Does she know the people she meets in London? In The Hague? Anywhere? Do we know her? We all keep things from each other. The beauty of The Little Red Chairs is that what we are given of the characters is enough to support a novel that shimmers and clings like gossamer. It makes you sick but you keep reading.
So it would be perfect but isn’t. There are *shudder* dream sequences. Dreams that have meaning. Dreams that offer insight into characters. I hate that. I hate it so much. So I took away a star. The Little Red Chairs is four stars out of five. Please don’t put dreams in your novels.
The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien went on sale October 29, 2015.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.