New Novel By Edna O'brien Is A Hypnotic Dazzler

We Edna O'Brien fans are a patient lot.

Since 1988 we have waited for a new novel from the woman many believe is one of the finest prose stylists in English and one of Ireland's great literary progeny.

And we have held out hope that O'Brien's just-released "Time and Tide" would echo the fierce brilliance of her earliest full-length works ("The Country Girls," "A Pagan Place") and her recent anthologies of short stories ("Lantern Slides").

Alas, we have not been forsaken. "Time and Tide" (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; $21) is a dazzler, a hypnotic saga of love and loss that sweeps you up in wave upon wave of emotive eloquence. The New York Times judged it O'Brien's "saddest and yet most mature novel," calling the author "a leading cardiologist of broken hearts."

From page one, the reader is plunged into seemingly familiar O'Brien territory: the swirling eddies of a distressed female psyche.

Nell, like other O'Brien protagonists, is an Irish-bred woman at odds with circumstance. She marries badly, bears two sons, flees her husband's cruelty and manages a tenuous life in London as an editor and single mother.

But fate treats Nell unkindly. Her one prolonged sexual affair is a disaster. And through the true loves of her life, her two sons, she faces the tragic limitations of maternal attachment.

In the mesmerizing final sections of the story, O'Brien monitors the devastating effects of a child's death with rare power and scrupulousness. And when in the end, after great torment, Nell tells herself "You can bear it," she blooms into an existential heroine.

Riding high on great reviews, O'Brien visited town recently for a reading at Seattle University.

On first sight - reed-thin and fragile-boned, with masses of red hair framing a milky, freckled face and sea-blue eyes - she resembles the lost Irish lasses in her books.

But settling down to coffee in a Pike Place Market cafe, the writer quickly dispelled any notions that she and Nell are synonymous. Yes, she also married unhappily, raised a pair of sons (one is an architect, the other a writer), and describes herself as "a wounded woman."

But Nell doesn't possess O'Brien's inviting charm and conversational agility, nor her steely alertness. And the writer flatly denies that her fictional women are submissive victims, or simply pathetic versions of herself.

"My characters are not passive," O'Brien emphasized in a honeyed brogue. "Desperate, yes. But it kind of irks me that Gogol in `Dead Souls' and Faulkner in `Light in August' can write about desperate men, men in extreme and irretrievable situations, and no one says these men are victims!

"When it's by Edna O'Brien," she continues, "people tend to review me rather than the book - which absolutely frenzies me! I hate this confusion, this intrusion. One interviewer even said to me, `Let's hope your relationships with your sons aren't as disastrous as Nell's,' as if he knew anything about it!"

Not that O'Brien can't understand some of the confusion. "Yes, I often (use) the confessional mode. And mind you, coming out of Ireland as a writer is no small journey. Sure, I've had a hell of a life, in some ways crippling. But that's separate from the prose that I put every minute of my waking life into. It's not easy getting that river-like unconscious flow. And it's hell sustaining it."

For O'Brien, writing is craft but also sacrament and possession. "The trouble with my sort of writing is that it never lets up, it never leaves you alone," she observes.

"Constable once said, `I paint feeling.' I think the same about language. I want my language to be extraordinary, always on its toes. But it's finally the feeling that makes something interesting, because language without emotion doesn't work - it's a game, a trick. And I despise literary tricks."

"Time and Tide" took three years to finish, a long time for O'Brien: "I was possessed and hurting, carrying this story. It took me forever, but when I finally came to the last section, about Nell's grief, it's as if God or life gave me a little present.

"When you can't sleep, that thin tissue between the conscious and the unconscious, that membrane of sanity, just goes. So I was awake in bed, suffering from jet lag, and suddenly just began writing down deep things. I was in a state of rawness and ecstasy, but I had no doubts at all about what I was doing - and I'm usually full of doubts."

She also had no doubts the novel should be centered in London. Though she has lived there more than 30 years (with frequent trips to the U.S. to teach), much of O'Brien's fiction is set in Ireland.

"`London's a very lonely place," O'Brien suggests, "and I believe that part of the reason why Nell doesn't have a sense of solidarity is because she's an outsider there, an exile. That's why her children are such an enormity to her.

"I find London doesn't have the same conviviality as, say, New York. Because England still, in various layers of its life, is very class-conscious, there's a kind of snobbishness directed toward you if you're Irish. The Celts are so different in temperament than the British, and temperament is everything."

In recent years O'Brien has branched into playwriting. She spoke enthusiastically of her new drama, about two major Irish figures: poet W.B. Yeats and the firebrand revolutionary Maud Gonne.

"It's called `Castle of Heroes,' and it's the most exciting play I've done," says the writer, whose Virginia Woolf biodrama, "Virginia," was performed in New York several years ago.

"This one has a big cast because it encompasses Irish history. It begins when Yeats met Maude Gonne at the start of the Irish land wars. Theirs is a great story, a mingle of history and unrequited love. I don't have a home for it yet, but I hope it will be done soon - perhaps in America."

O'Brien answered eagerly when asked about her own favorite authors.

"Every day of my life I read a bit of Chekhov," she said, her eyes alight. "Chekhov goes beyond writing - he distills life. He reminds me, yet again, that the principal agenda of a writer is the notation of the soul. You read three lines of Chekhov and think, `Oh God, I must keep human!' "

Before one could tell O'Brien that "Time and Tide" has the same effect, the hour is up. And she has wafted off to another appointment.