In the Forest [LARGE PRINT] (Hardcover)

by Edna O'Brien (Author) "WOODLAND STRADDLING two counties and several townlands, a drowsy corpus of green, broken only where the odd pine has struck up on its own, spindly,..." (more)
Key Phrases: pet fox, missing people, Cloosh Wood, Father Damien, Father John (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In the best of Edna O'Brien's novels, there is a lawless element, a violence, that springs up to satisfy some primal urge: revenge, desire, thwarted love, or even the seemingly contrasting need of a community for balance and order. In the Forest is based on a true story of a local terror, a murderer sprung from the fertile soil of the west Ireland countryside. Michen O'Kane is a loving boy gone bad. His father beat his mother, and his mother died young, leaving 10-year-old Michen to the indifferent care of relatives and teachers. A rich fantasy life and little outside guidance quickly lead to a detention center, where Michen is the prey of bullies, as well as of a kindly priest with an unfortunate use for small boys. But none of these factors fully explains Michen's transformation into a killer. It is one of the strengths of this difficult and beautifully written novel that the lyrical fragments of Michen's tale--told from various points of view--do not completely add up. The dark mysteries of psychosis are left intact. We have only evocative glimpses of Michen's inner world and a crystal-clear image of the ruin he left behind. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Based on a real triple homicide that shocked Ireland in 1994, O'Brien's short, stark and eloquent novel reveals an unforgettable prospect of hell. This hell is contained in the feverishly disturbed mind of Michen O'Kane (perhaps a wordplay on Cain), the murderer. From an early age, O'Kane displays spontaneous unsociability, for which he is punished with unremitting cruelty, first by his wife-beating father, then by the villagers of Cloosh, his small Irish village, and then by the Irish juvenile detention system, where he is sodomized and psychologically tortured. O'Kane comes back to Cloosh a ticking bomb, hearing voices in his head. After he sets up a camp in the woods, he sets his sights on a relative stranger in the village, a free spirit named Eily Ryan who, with her son, Maddie, is living a modern, single mother's lifestyle obscurely disapproved of by the conservative villagers. One morning O'Kane kidnaps her and the boy. She's forced to drive O'Kane to his woods, passing through the village in full view of several frightened bystanders, who do nothing to help her. After murdering his two victims, O'Kane kidnaps a priest and repeats the act. Like Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, this story is about acts of naked violence that put to an extreme test the proposition that nothing human is alien to us. O'Brien's brilliant stroke is to make us understand that O'Kane is not merely a savage madman, by placing him in the milieu that formed his character. Incapable of overcoming childhood patterns of violence, O'Kane, in a horribly distorted way, becomes our mirror image; he's both "the personification of evil" and our "own flesh and blood, gone amok." O'Brien's sentient, sonorous prose makes both O'Kane's inner world and his environment nearly palpable. 4-city author tour.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press; Largeprint edition (September 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786257288
• ISBN-13: 978-0786257287
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,053,998 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply Stunning, April 18, 2002

By	Laure-Madeleine (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In the Forest: A Novel (Hardcover)

After reading the opening paragraph of this newest novel from Edna O'Brien, 'In the Forest,' I was hooked. Her lush prose is so descriptive that I felt I was being drawn into that dark wood to revisit the scene of one of the most heinous crimes in the Irish Republic in the past twenty years. Between April 29 and May 7, 1994, Brendan O'Donnell, 20, abducted five people and murdered three. The innocent victims, whose bodies were found in shallow graves in Cleggs Woods, were artist Imelda Riney, her 3-year-old son, Liam, and Father Joe Walsh. At the time, the consciousness of the countryside of County Clare, where Ms. O'Brien had grown up, was galvanized in fear of this psychopathic killer. 'They are afraid of him now, the Kinderschreck, one of their own sons come out of their own soil, their own flesh and blood, gone amok.' Mr. O'Donnell was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment, but, in 1997, he died while in prison from a drug interaction.

Not since reading 'In Cold Blood,' by Truman Capote, have I encountered a book based on a true crime as riveting as this one. This Irish Gothic novel is 'faction'; Ms. O'Brien bases her narrative on factual events around the time of the crime, but she has fictionalized the names and places. The editorial reviews give a good plot synopsis for this novel, so I will focus my remarks elsewhere.

Ms. O'Brien uses the true crime story as a springboard to comment on the Irish experience. Here she handles such hot topics as politics and sexual politics, paganism, priest pedophilia, and child abuse. As Jeanette Winterson stated recently on a BBC panel that discussed this book, '[t]he 20th century has been the century all the ordinary categories have been broken down, between fiction and non-fiction, between the real and the imagined, between autobiography and invention. . . . Edna O'Brien succeeds here perfectly.'

Her style in this novel is what I might call 'Faulkneresque-lite.' About when I would think the prose was becoming too purple for my taste, she seemed to shift into a sparer phrasing. The Gothic style is a perfect match for the story because her descriptions of the forest are so vivid that one feels fear and dread and senses the gloom of this place without light. 'How engulfing the darkness, how useless their tracks in the rust-brown carnage of old dead leaves. Pines and spruces close together, their tall solid trunks like an army going on and on, in unending sequence, furrows of muddy brown water and no birds and no sound other than that of a wind, unceasing, like the sound of a distant sea. But it is not sea, it is Cloosh Wood, and they are being marched through it.'

One approach to reading, 'In the Forest,' would be to look at the forest, woods, and trees - the landscape - as metaphor. Her powerful prose imagery engages the imagination through an association of forests and woods with primordial fears of dark, damp, deep, and devouring places. The pacing of the story is brilliant, and it keeps one turning pages well into the wee hours of the morning. My sole criticism of this stunning book has to do with the ending, which has a bit of a tacked-on feel to it. While there may be an essential Irishness to the need for atonement and repentance, the narrative here seems somewhat contrived. The final passage is a bit of Irish magic, as if to say that the darkness ends here, now come to the light.

'In the Forest' contains an evocative icon: 'the Kinderschreck,' or 'meaning someone of whom small children are afraid.' This image of bogeyman or monster is part of our collective unconscious. It's found in our fairy tales and is sometimes used to scare children into being good. The women in the search party for the victims of 'the Kinderschreck,' Michen O'Kane, said, 'Deep down we believe he has been sent by God, as punishment upon us.'

As many have said, Edna O'Brien is one of the greatest working novelists today. If you've not read any of her books, 'In the Forest' is a good place to begin.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kinderschreck, July 3, 2002

By	Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: In the Forest: A Novel (Hardcover)

A boy, robbed off his mother's love at the age of ten. Refusing to believe she is dead, clinging to the idea that she was buried alive while she was sleeping, digging a hole into the ground near her grave in order to speak to her. A loner who, then and there, decides to become "a true son of the forest," as his mother in a dream apparition has told him to be. (Or was that an early delusion?) An adolescent, locked up in juvenile homes, boarding schools, prisons and other institutions, abused by a priest, neglected, ignored, and locking himself off against the outside world in response. Putting to practice the one lesson he has learned from Lazlo, the boys' schizophrenic leader in the first such institution; Lazlo who heard voices and who has taught him that the one thing that counts is to hate "them" (the grown-ups, those that stand for authority and society as a whole) with a worse hate than they have for him. A young man, unable to show any feeling other than that long-practiced hatred; acting out his suppressed emotions in violence whenever he is not locked up, unable to escape the voices now talking in his head more and more often, just as they were once talking in Lazlo's.

And a young woman with long red hair. Maddie's mother, raising her young son alone, breaking off all relationships with men as soon as they get to close for comfort. An outsider, only recently moved to the village. A teacher. An artist. Mistress of ceremonies at a Celtic festival, performing pagan rituals. Druidess. Mystery woman whom nobody knows with complete intimacy, maybe not even her sister Cassandra and her best friend Madge. Raped and murdered by a young man trapped between insanity and emotional deprivation, for whom she is the realization of everything he associates with the idea of the female - simultaneously fairy queen, virgin, angel, object of his sexual fantasies, whore, confidante and most importantly, mother.

This is the couple which, in the deadly dance at the heart of Edna O'Brien's "In the Forest," is locked together by fate; a fate prompted by the murderer's delusions and rage as much as by society's inability to deal with him. And this first murder is only the starting point of a killing spree which will demand several more victims before the young man is apprehended. - Like two of her previous novels, "House of Splendid Isolation" (inspired by the Irish "troubles") and "Down By the River" (addressing incest, abortion and society's inability to deal with either, as expressed in the trial of a girl who went to England to abort the child conceived from her own father), Ms. O'Brien's latest book is based on a series of real events which deeply shook the Irish society in the mid-1990s, and which occurred in the county which O'Brien, before moving to London, used to call her home. But here as there, the author is less interested in the hard, cold facts as such but rather, in the psychology involved and society's response to the unspeakable horror of the crimes committed; in "man and the intentions of his soul," as she said in a recent article, quoting Leonardo da Vinci. And like the great painter, with an unrelenting eye for detail she takes the reader into the killer's mind; a mind inexorably spiraling, spiraling, spiraling into a dark abyss from which soon there is no way out. At the same time, the reader experiences the terror of the abduction felt by his victims; the slow and chilling realization that there is no escape, that this last walk into the somber depth of the forest is the way into certain death, to be preceded by a suffering dreadful beyond imagination. Yet, the tale is not solely told from the perspective of Michen O'Kane, the killer and rapist, the "Kinderschreck" and bogeyman who holds an entire county at gunpoint; nor only from that of his victims, Eily Ryan and her son, and the others that will follow them within a matter of days. Thread by thread, Ms. O'Brien weaves the voices of all those involved in the events - the vicitims' relatives, the killer's family, the police, neighbors, women of the community and the psychiatrist who treated O'Kane at trial - into a fabric of rage, helplessness, despair and desolation; symbolized by the vast, dark, threatening forest where the first murders have taken place, that "chamber of non-light" which "lost its old name and its old innocence in the hearts of the people" when a dead goat "decomposed and stank" in a wooden hut at the farthest entrance to the forest.

In her native Ireland, Edna O'Brien was severely criticized for "In the Forest," even before the novel was published, and accused of exploiting a gruesome crime for the sake of selling a story. The families of the victims of the incidents on which the novel is based reportedly spoke out against the book. But while it is undoubtedly difficult for them to deal with those events, the reaction of others only demonstrates the accuracy of Ms. O'Brien's analysis. Yet again, the woman who to many seems to be a literary "Kinderschreck" herself, whose first six (!) books were banned because of their daring stance on women's role in the Irish society (and society in general), and who moved to London years ago to "escape from those fields, gates, trees, woods, winds, sleet, priests, nuns and family, all of whom seemed to overwhelm [her]," as she wrote in the above-mentioned article, has held up a mirror before her fellow men; and yet again, some do not like what they see. That criticism, however, reflects more on those articulating it than on the author herself or her book. "In the Forest" is as brilliantly written as it is necessary - as shown by nothing better than by the reactions it provoked. A deeply disturbing book, but under no circumstances to be missed.

Also recommended:
The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue
Down by the River
The House of Splendid Isolation : A Novel
Dancing at Lughnasa

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In the forest of madness, April 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: In the Forest: A Novel (Hardcover)

"In the Forest" borders on creative nonfiction. Based on real, gruesome events which took place in one of the western counties of Ireland, the book is a fictionalized account of these events, augmented by equally fictional life story of the protagonist. It's hard to say that Michen O'Kane is a protagonist, really, because the weight of importance is quite substantially dispersed in the novel. Although the events and the backbone of the storyline are central to the narration, I think the author has undertaken quite a different direction in the book; the ultimate accent is put on the setting, the neighborhood, the analysis of circumstances, rather than the usual set of characters, be they major or minor. The author almost never ventures deeply into the character's introspection, which is merely just another block in the mosaic, never dominating the remainder. Despite that fact, "In the Forest" is a fascinating psychological studium of deviation. Having provided the literary account of the slaughter and the paranoia that preceded it, Edna O'Brien wanted to pin down the reasons why at one time in the life of a man, a seemingly unimportant event can change the whole life of this individual, what are the motivations that inevitably push him to the edge of the abyss, and then one step too far, past the point of return, and precisely why there is no point of return, once the mind snaps, once the critical mass of confusion is achieved, and the darkness of madness starts to dominate from that point on.

One might suppose that to provide a fictional background for the shocking, real-life events is quite common and unoriginal, and that the reader might pretty well guess what to expect from the novel of this type. The point is, "In the Forest" is not the novel of any such type, and certainly you will be surprised if you think that "In the Forest" can be categorized using any genre classifications. To pigeonhole a novel of this class is indeed a crime. Short chapters, one by one, introduce us to many viewpoints, where narration styles are blended, perspectives skewed, mixed and exchanged, where exactly when you expect the action to pick up, the flow of the story becomes sublime and poetic, and when you get progressively used to the book being a wonderfully painted portrayal of the Irish country with the unique communities inhabiting them, the flow is brutally intercepted with a sequence of chapters with all accents inverted. Reading this book is a pleasure hardly comparable with anything that may await the reader of contemporary fiction in the new century.

Edna O'Brien is I think one of the greatest living and active novelists of our day. It's quite uncommon for a writer to get better and better over the many long years, usually it's the other way round. Anno Domini 2002, it's no longer enough to say that Edna O'Brien has her own, instantly recognizable style, that her writing is of unmatched class, of sparkling beauty and mesmerizing, poetic narration, where even the unthinkable and devastating shines on like a lone diamond down by the Irish river. An absolutely stunning phenomenon of this writer is that she continues to innovate, to expand the boundaries of the literary world of fiction. After so many years, several highly revered books, the new entries leave us wondering if there is any limit at all. We find ourselves in an awkward situation, where each and every books of Edna rises the threshold of expectations, and yet the next entry surpasses the predecessors and the updated expectations alike. "In the Forest" is pure delight, the exhilarating reading experience, the penultimate dot over i, after which nothing else seems to add anything of interest on the topic.