Watching Dragons Mate: Edna O’Brien’s ‘Girl’
Patricia Lockwood, 5 December 2019
A typical Edna O’Brien story begins on a square of green. A stone farmhouse looms behind, with a slick spot on the flagstones where the same tin can is emptied every morning by the hired man. Pigs are somewhere in the mix, as are sheep and cows. Around and above and within the green floats another colour, that of deep velvet, the sacred heart, a dog’s tongue. This is the austere plush of the Catholic Church, which is everywhere. A road skips like a ribbon past the front door, punctuated by one of the few unbeautiful things in the landscape: men who lie in wait to do pooly in you. Your father is drunk, or trying not to be, and your mother is ‘the sideboard with everything in it’. If you are not in Ireland, you’ve gone somewhere to get away from Ireland. So. ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, when her latest novel arrived in the mail, ‘this book is about Boko Haram???’