Customer Reviews

In the Forest: A Novel

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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.

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

"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.

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, [...], 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 O'Brien's previous novels, "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) and "House of Splendid Isolation" (inspired by the Irish "troubles"), "In the Forest" 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 once said in a newspaper 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

Into the Forest is a disturbing look into the tortured soul of a man haunted by his past. He, is drawn into deeper evils that suck him ever deeper and deeper, not releasing him - or we readers - till the very last page. Based on a true-life triple homicide in Ireland in 1994, O'Brien's tale takes us into the hunted and haunted mind of O'Kane, the murderer. This story deals with acts of naked violence and is not for the faint of heart. No sunny conclusion, either.

Edna O'Brien, with this novel and "Girl with the Green Eyes," became part of my first trip to Dublin. Despite my motives for perusing charming Irish stories, this novel is anything but lightweight and packs a sobering and disturbing emotional wallop.

This is the story of Mich, demented young man ripe for murder. Ms. O'Brien traces his emotional development and dementia through a precise and evocative outline of his mother's death, the constant abuse from other children and adults at home and later in various institutions, including sexual abuse by a priest as well as physical abuse by guards. By the time he is let out of these institutions he claims that his head "isn't right" and is already a proven criminal. Ms. O'Brien makes it clear that although he is dangerous, he suffers intense emotional turmoil.

This is also a story of a West Ireland country community and several new residents such as a young woman named Eily and her three year old son Maddie. When Mich is let out of prison and returns to the village he stalks Eily and eventually abducts her and her son. The entire community is terrified of Mich but are slow to react and are, as a result, responsible in part for the tragedies which occur. Finally, after the crimes have been committed, panic sets in and Mich is hunted down both by civilians and law enforcers with avidity. This thirst for justice continues throughout his capture and interrogations. Every recounted moment is agonizing and painful from the point of view of both the criminal and the lawmen. Mich is convicted and descends further into his own mental hell. Despite the occasional use of harmless Irish colloquialisms and customs, this story is deeply upsetting.

I like to avoid making conscious references to concrete symbolism in literature but in this case the notion of the forest in the title can't be avoided. It is clear that we are taken into both a physical forest and the "forest" of Mich's mind. If handled clumsily this could become tedious but in this story it's both atmospheric and necessary. In the end, a little boy loses himself in these same woods, in the same place where hell was enacted. He sleeps peacefully in the pine needles. "Magic," Edna O'Brien tells us "follows only the few."

Contrary to first impression, this story is not centered around the gory details of violence committed by the main character, Michen O'Kane. While the brutality of his crimes adds to our understanding of his character (or lack thereof), I feel this book delves deeper, into the intricate relationship between criminal and society. We, as readers, are given a unique vantage point - one we may not be exposed to even in some of today's horror happenings. We see the situation from both perspectives: that of the many victims, and that of the "Kinderschreck" himself.
O'Brien creates eerie suspense with the best of them, though it is not rewarded (like I said, it's not about the gory details). The small, rustic towns of Ireland (complete with authentic gaelic names) in which the story takes place adds to the spookiness, much like in the movie "Fargo". The unsympathetic woods in the backdrop that stand witness to the horror add another dimension to the criminal/society theme that I mentioned before. My only complaint is that the story just tapers off at the end, not really consistent with the rest of the book.

O'Brien's dark jewel of a novel packs a wallop. There are plenty of social explanations for Michan O'Kane's psychotic behavior, but what lingers is our primary experience with his dark desires, his tormenting voices, and his innocent victims. Cloosh Wood may be set in Ireland, but as we read its branches seem to be scraping at the very window. O'Kane's violence seems independent of specific weaponry or motivation - it's a primal force that brushes by us in a crowd and gives us goosebumps or wakes us in the night and sends us downstairs to make sure the children are safe. Forgiveness and understanding are present in this novel, but finally no human characters seem capable of delivering us from evil. We end up simply praying that it passes us by.

In The Forest tells a story of a boy who has gone astray from his flock. The main character who happens to be this stories antagonist reminds me most of a mix between Michael Myers and Amelie, he has a very planed out way in which things should happen much like Amelie, but he does seem to enjoy killing and maiming as only Michael Myers could. Michen O'Kane also known as the kinderschreck (someone small children are afraid of) starts out as mildly insane, like someone preparing for an AP test. However his madness slowly becomes very apperent when the voices in his head begin to tell him to do things. One of this novels most interesting aspects is that it's narration is so diverse. Most of the book is told by good old 3rd person somebody, but every four or so chapters the narration will switch to one of the characters. What this allows for the reader is a much stronger knowledge of what is going on in the story because you not only get the view of the narrator who gives the all encompassing view, but you also get the view of the people the story revolves around. The fear within this town caused by the kinderschreck is truly felt. The only real disappointment I had in this book was what so many of today's stories suffer from, a disease I call authorshavetohaveeverythingokayism. Symptoms of this disease are mainly the villain in the story being shown to be quite evil, and then turning out to regret his actions. Some stories can get away with this like star wars, where Darth Vader ends up saving his son and killing the imbalance in the force. However in In The Forest this "dramatic" turn around doesn't make me feel for the now non-violent character, it makes me want to eat the book. So to finish up my review this book made me hungry . . . uuummmmmm paper (a 4 out 5 on the taste-o-meter).

this is the first Edna O'Brien book I have read, but it will not be the last. Her capacity for finding characters voices, her sensitivity in dealing with subjects and her masterful handling of a brutal story have made me a fan.

She started has based this on a true story, of a psychopathic killer who returned to his homeground in Ireland, killing three locals before he was caught and convicted. How much of this book actually is true I don't know - how many of the characters are real live people whom she is reflecting in the work, and how much is pure fiction would be interesting to know but not necessary.

The strength of this work, for me anyway, was her ability to speak in each chapter from a different character's perspective - the rushed and hurried tones of sympathetic witnesses, to the pitiful and victimised voice of the killer. Although I was aware of the outcome it was still fresh and surprising as the various layers of lies and counter lies were stripped away from the story to reveal the truth.

It is a wonderful and moving novel which I have recommended to several other readers now with all enjoying its compelling story.