Down by the River [Hardcover]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1997

Set in the author's native Ireland, a powerful and passionate novel relates the story of a young girl who becomes pregnant by her father, a situation made worse when it becomes fodder for the mill of church, state, and the town square. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A few years ago, Ireland was forced to confront its conscience when a 14-year-old girl, the purported victim of rape, sought an abortion in England. The ensuing legal and moral battles exposed the Emerald Isle's centuries-long struggles over religion, sexuality, and the position of women. Irish writer Edna O'Brien revisits this embattled territory in her novel Down by the River, a bleak, uncompromising chronicle of poverty, unwanted pregnancy, and despair. O'Brien's protagonist is Mary, almost 14 years old and pregnant by her widowed father. In a repressed, judgmental rural world, Mary can tell no one of her plight. Eventually she tries to drown herself, only to be rescued by a neighbor, Betty. When Betty learns the reason for Mary's suicide attempt, she arranges to take her to England for an abortion. Before the operation can occur, Mary is coerced into returning to Ireland and there she becomes the focal point in a ferocious nationwide debate about abortion.

O'Brien is unsparing in her depictions of the economic and emotional poverty in which her characters live, yet she can be surprisingly empathetic toward even the least likeable among them, showing, for example, the tender side of Mary's father even as she exposes his brutality. The book's language is rich and laden with imagery, at times in shocking contrast to the parched lives she describes. Down by the River is just the latest in a long line of fiercely honest books by a fearlessly honest author.

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by a highly controversial incident that took place in Ireland a few years ago, O'Brien's latest novel (after House of Splendid Isolation) is a riveting and resonating story. Mary, a young teenager, seems an ordinary girl but hides an abominable secret. For years, she has been brutalized and sexually abused by a monstrous father, a crime her victimized mother ignores. Even those?neighbors, priests and teachers?who know Mary and have their suspicions, say nothing. A dreadful silence is maintained in conformance to a society whose view of sexuality has become perverted by a fanatical church and a conservative state. When the forced incest results in Mary's pregnancy, a neighbor does rally to her side, but with disastrous results. Church and state use their full powers to enforce laws banning abortion; the consequences are devastating. Mary metamorphoses from terrified innocent to potential murderess. Her fate thrown into the hands of the "men in suits" in the courtroom and psychiatric ward, she is buffeted between the pro-life and the pro-choice camps like a human football, and her case fills headlines and blares from the television. Taking Mary's point of view, and revealing the full horror and pathos of her heroine's plight only gradually, O'Brien creates a stark, unflinching story. But a simultaneous poetic sense also embues the narrative with beauty and grace. O'Brien's early books were originally banned in her native Ireland for daring to put on paper the idea that Irish women had a sexuality at all. Here, she has written a harrowing, punchout of a book that leaves the reader drained.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 265 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed edition (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374143277
• ISBN-13: 978-0374143275
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,607,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" Trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deavastatingly Shocking Tale, December 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Down by the River (Hardcover)

They say the curse of the Irish is the drink. But to understand your own brutal, beautiful country as well as Edna O'Brien understands hers must be a bigger curse by far. There's no way a blessed person could have written a novel as shimmering, as ruthless and as devastating as "Down by the River": it's evidence of something more than mere talent, or even genius, at work. O'Brien's gifts are magnificent and terrifying, along the lines of stigmata and clairvoyance -- the kind of gifts that mark you.

Inspired by a case in Ireland, in which a 14-year-old rape victim was forbidden by the courts to leave the country to obtain an abortion, "Down by the River" is the story of Mary MacNamara. After being raped by her father, Mary conceives his child. A sympathetic neighbor brings her to England for an abortion, but the authorities haul them back, cowing them with their ugly threats. Mary refuses to name the baby's father, and her case becomes a cause that turns her own friends and neighbors against her. She's seen as both a villain and an object of sanctimonious condescension in the Catholic community.

That community's cruelty is the bitter, driving force of the book -- but it's Mary's suffering and loneliness that are at the heart of it. After a street musician befriends her (he lets her stay at his flat for a few days and buys her a cheap sweater), she writes him a letter: "I nearly died when you gave me that jumper. You shouldn't have. Turquoise is my favorite color. There are two kinds of alone, there's the kind which you are and the kind which I am. Your alone is beautiful, it's rich." It's a passage that takes you apart, the way a teenager's breathless enthusiasm is crushed by the young woman's overwhelming sense of fear and isolation.

O'Brien never takes the easy way out: not even Mary's father is painted as a monster. She describes how he helps birth a colt -- reaching into the mare's womb and coaxing it out by both brute strength and force of will, saving the mother's life in the process -- with such grace and tenderness that even against your will, you feel yourself almost, almost, growing to understand him.

But O'Brien doesn't hold back when it comes to her wrath at the Catholic Church, and at the small-minded Irish who slavishly follow it at the expense of their own humanity. O'Brien has lived in London for more than 20 years -- she isn't welcome in her own country, for obvious reasons -- and yet Ireland will never leave her. Her stories work on us exactly the way her homeland has worked on her. They can stare you down and tear you apart like a wolf -- and then, miraculously and tenderly, bring you back to life again, stronger and better than before. With "Down by the River," O'Brien marks us as well: it's the kind of book that takes days, maybe weeks, to shake.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Irish hypocrisy revealed, February 11, 2003

By 

Marsha E. Lytle (Olathe, KS United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Down by the River (Mass Market Paperback)

Mary McNamara's life in rural western Ireland is that of a typical young teenager until one day while she is on a walk on their land, her father violates the most sacred bond between parent and child and rapes her. Unable to tell anyone, she keeps the secret, except for her diary entries. When the abuse results in an unwanted pregnancy, it precipitates a national crises when she is taken to England for an abortion.
Based on real events, this novel accurately portrays how a Catholic nation can be inflamed over a cause such at this even while the morality of the citizens is in decline as evidenced by premarital sex, living in sin, affairs, and out of wedlock births.
While I enjoyed the story of Mary's plight, the novel itself was often times confusing with so many characters and shifts in focus so that after awhile you sort of lost track of who was who. By the end I was thinking it could have been told in a much more straightforward manner in less pages.
Mary's father, James, the obvious villan in this book, is a tragic figure. He seems a contradictory character, gentle with his livestock, proud of his daughter's accomplishments at school, and missing her presence, even while he violates her. Without a wife to serve his needs, it seems Mary is to fulfill that role on all counts. In the end it is hard to feel much more than pity for this pathetic nature.
Mary, for being all of fourteen, seems stronger than either of her parents in enduring the many hardhsips and allowing herself to be used by different fractions for their own purposes. It is hard to imagine what her life would be like afterwards, though the last pages try to give us a glimpse of her new life.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the themes of the story., September 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Down by the River (Mass Market Paperback)

In DOWN BY THE RIVER O'Brien one of the more prevalent themes is the treatment of Mary. When everyone finds out she has went to get an abortion, people automatically assume she is a tramp, and this O'Brien portrays how someone can become so set pregnancy is a result of her "wild youthful ways." in their veiws that you fail to gain the facts before rushing to a judgement. Few people bothered to ask Mary is this pregnancy was a result of bad judgement, or a result of someone else's forceful and abusvie actions. O'Brien didn't really the reader a deep insight to how Mary may have felt as the subject of this fierce national debate. It's almost like Mary wasn't allowed to feel, or she was afraid to feel scared, frightened, angry, ashamed, fearful. Few people bothered to find out how Mary felt, it was more about what she was going to or had already attempted to do. O'Brien portrays that the characters became more concerned with the issue itself, than with the person which the issue was about and her feelings.