I Have To Give Up Edna O'Brien

 Not because I find anything wrong with her writing. It is a sore point with me that I have been so much time on the computer that my eyes hurt too much to read print. I borrowed the collection An Edna O'Brien Reader over 2 months ago and have only now finished the short novel August is A Wicked Month.

The slowness I cannot put down to obtuse prose or a boring tale. The following comes from the last chapter. I think it can be understood out of context - there is a disease, there is trauma related to her son. The prose touches on what has gone before in the plot, then adds the theme of Catholic guilt that encroaches even on those who have left the church.

“I wouldn’t,” she said. Her monstrous affliction had put her out of reach of other people. It was funny to think that insanity was the downfall that used to dog her, of how she might go raving mad like the two women who thrust themselves into the solitary lake. But this was something less pitiful; contagious, and unforgivable in fact. Nothing moved or spoke to her from the real world now unless she saw in it an echo of her own cast-away plight. There could be no chance that anyone would want to help her, any more than she had helped her own son. Fate. Or, created by herself, and her own willful follies. Either way these things had all happened and were floating under her memory’s eye and would be sealed eventually by her death. Dumb and insensible to the call of friendship, sex, whiskey, comfort, she could only contain herself by repeating to herself that there were in the world strangers, doctors, science, drugs—things that could cure her body at least. She thought of the Confessional and that black grille through which she used to murmur “I cursed, I told lies, I had bad thoughts,” and she remembered that she never came away feeling absolved no matter how great the priest’s strictures had been or how painful the penance. Perhaps it was the same with bodily ailments. Her stomach still bore the pitter-patter marks of muscles strained in childbearing, and a neck operation had left a permanent: scar. Nothing healed.

My one trouble is with the setting of the novel. I just checked, and the copyright is 1965. It felt like that time period, the sort that you get from English movies of the time. Rivera hotels and beaches, movie stars and parties, the working mother and divorced wife, no credit cards, no mass tourism, no rock stars (not even a mention of The Beatles), and it reads more like a historical novel now. An alien life. If I am correct in my understanding of O'Brien's career, her own work undermined that world.

Maybe, too, time has gone from when the cachet of sexual adventures as a cure for all ills has become instead a warning of their illusory nature. It perhaps is that O'Brien's novel was at the forefront of this movement. Fear of Flying was about 10 years later.

Then there is a need to get onto my own work. I was supposed to have three chapters done this week. Instead, I revised a short story and worked on blog posts. Not that I cannot rationalize these divergences. The former was working on my writing; especially in how I revise stories and disclosing my laziness. The latter because I was collecting research for later use.

I find her writing charming, even beguiling. Otherwise, I would not regret returning the book to the library. Putting her off to the future feels like I am missing an important experience.

Some other viewpoints. They do better than I do in explaining its plot.

Catching up on literature you may have missed–'August is a Wicked Month' by Edna O'Brien (Steve E. Clark)

O’Brien really does a fine job of getting into the mind of her character, including the repulsive aspects of her wandering. The reader will want to get into the book, grab Ellen by the shoulders, and shake some sense into her while she’s in France and then will want to comfort her once she is home. The story is a tragedy in the true sense of the word, but if you’re in the mood to catch up on literature you’ve missed, you can do a lot worse than August is a Wicked Month.

‘August is a Wicked Month’ by Edna O’Brien (Reading Matters, 2023)

It’s so evocative of a time and place and she writes so lyrically about being on holiday and experiencing new things. It’s also a fascinating insight into a woman’s interior life, her sexual desires and her hunger to live life to the fullest.

But it was the switch in mood — from light to dark — that really made an impression on me. It was like a kick to the stomach and suddenly the whole story took on a different purpose and became so much more than I had imagined at the start. It made me think about so much and I can see from having re-read the earlier sections that O’Brien had carefully plotted the entire story arc.

August is a Wicked Month, by Edna O’Brien; A Green Tree in Gedde, by Alan Sharp; and Second Generation, by Raymond Williams (Commentary Magazine 1965) - seems a little off the mark, I do not see any happy ending but a bittersweet anti-climax, but it is also by someone who read O'Brien's preceding three novels.

The plot of August Is a Wicked Month lends itself to caricature. It also lends itself to Fanny Hillism. I am not suggesting that the book is pornographic within the meaning of the law, but it is insistently and relentlessly distasteful, sickeningly voyeuristic. I enjoyed Miss O'Brien's first two novels and felt some admiration for her third, Girls in their Married Bliss, which (one can now see) gave hints in the story of Kate of what was to follow. The new novel is a hangover from the Kate and Baba books, a discharge of accumulated bile, to put it politely. The old jokes reappear here, with the humor drained out of them. In the previous novel, Baba suggested that the homeless Kate could safely spend the night in a bath outside an ironmonger's shop on the King's Road as long as she hung out a sign saying, “Keep out. Gonorrhoea”—but there is no Baba here. And Kate didn't like talking to the psychiatrist, “it violated her sense of privacy.” Alas, Miss O'Brien has no compunctions about Ellen's sense of privacy—or ours. August Is a Wicked Month, in spite of the individual talent its author has previously displayed, is a typical contemporary novel. It tells all—it tells nothing.

I felt an emptiness at the end. I understood full well how a parent could close off a dead child's bedroom and leave it untouched until their own death.

Book Review: “August is a Wicked Month” by Edna O'Brien (Geeks, 2025)

All in all, there are plenty more realisations that happen in this book - there is something uncomfortable about reading it as well. I love the way we see this character change into someone who's impulsivity is constantly grabbing hold of them every single time it catches up. The character-centric narrative is written in a style that is both descriptive and relfects the distress of the character each step of the way - it is not done by accident. Among these descriptions there are also quick-fire dialogue sections that reflect upon us the terse responses of real-world conversation. Again, it gives us perspective upon our own lives - are we really living right?

The Commentary reviewer's caricatures and emptiness may be the same as the uncomfortableness here. Maybe time has given us a better perspective, we are now the heirs of this book and the changes of morality that has come our way since 1965. What distresses us is the emptiness, not the sexual games.

Edna O’Brien: ‘I want to go out as someone who spoke the truth’ (The Guardian, 2019)

Her suddenly unleashed creativity unwittingly incensed Gébler, who appeared at breakfast one morning with a manuscript copy of the novel in his hand. He told her: “You can write and I will never forgive you.” Their marriage was dissolved in 1964 and, against the odds, O’Brien was granted custody of the children after a three-year legal battle in which supposedly scandalous passages from her fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month, were used as evidence of her wayward character.

Sanctimony has ways of imposing itself - usually in the cruelest ways possible.

 A tragedy? I hate using that over-worked term, but it comes closer to that an empty-headed shocker.

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