House of Splendid Isolation [Paperback]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 1995

Josie, the ailing, elderly inhabitant of an Irish country mansion, dwells in the shadowy world of remembered pain and loneliness. McGreevy, the terrorist, reintroduces the possibility of compassion and tenderness, but there is an inevitably violent conclusion to their understanding as the police net closes. With extraordinary skill and empathy, Edna O'Brien shows two faces of a divided land: the yearnings of a woman whose youthful joy was broken, and the intransigent idealism of her captor. Brave and moving, THE HOUSE OF SPLENDID ISOLATION is Edna O'Brien at her very best.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An elderly Irish woman develops a relationship with an escaped IRA terrorist who has sought refuge in her home in O'Brien's 14th novel.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"A man will come and a child will go out," says a gypsy girl to Josie some time after she first enters her husband's house, having returned to Ireland from America to marry him. The man who comes in is an IRA terrorist on the run from the police who invades Josie's house when she is living there alone as an old woman. The child had been lost to an abortion early in Josie's marriage, at a time when she could not cope with her uncouth husband and a life she had chosen in desperation. The two stories are deftly woven together by the remarkable O'Brien ( Time and Tide , LJ 4/1/92), who manages to sum up a century of Irish sorrow in this taut, lyrical novel, filled with scenes so vividly rendered they seem captured in a flash of lightning. Not the least of O'Brien's accomplishments is her ability to present both sides of the Irish problem in all their complexity without settling heavily on either side. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/94.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix (April 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857992091
• ISBN-13: 978-1857992090
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,318,867 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

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Splendid writing, spendid story., July 18, 1997

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: House of Splendid Isolation (Hardcover)

If you read the Kirkus Review above, you won't even have to buy the book, if all you are interested in is the plot.

Fortunately, there's much more here, and I wish I knew how O'Brien does it! Of the thousands of books I've read, this is the first one which really made me feel that the author "let the story tell itself." For most of the book, there's no sense that an author is pulling strings or trying to create. She "merely" presents fully drawn characters, and they truly live on the page.

Yet at the conclusion, the admiring reader realizes that every conflict and ultimate reversal in the book has had a fine hand guiding, but never obviously controlling, it--from Josie's psychological imprisonment to McGreevy's escapes, from her frustrations in love to his satisfactions, from her experiences that life is something that happens to her to his belief that one must mobilize to work toward a higher goal, from their attitudes toward the church to their conflicted feelings about the IRA.

Somewhat extravagant in its romanticism at the end, that extravagance, nevertheless, is totally appropriate to its subject, its characters, and its Irish setting.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Female writer gets it right, July 17, 2003

By 

Donna J. Oestreich-hart "Dr. Mom" (Greenville, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The House of Splendid Isolation: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

I won't summarize the story, because you have several other summaries already. I will only say this: Several of the analytical comments below are simply wrong. O'Brien's view of Ireland's history is right on the mark. Ireland's "troubles" really started in the 1100's when Irishman Dermott McMurragh asked King Henry II of England to allow him to recruit Anglo-Norman mercenary soldiers to help him defeat his Irish enemy. Those mercenaries came, liked it, and stayed. THAT was the beginning of the English occupation of Ireland. But even before that, Irish families fought among themselves for control of the land and resources. You only have to read the "Cattle Raid of Cooley" to know that. In a very real sense, there IS blood in the very soil of Ireland. And O'Brien is RIGHT that the only way to ever solve that problem--or the Middle Eastern problem or the American racial problem--is for EVERY voice to be heard (that's why the narrative voice keeps changing; it is purposeful)and EVERY person to be known as a human being and not just as "them" or "the enemy."

She has these two unlikely people, each with their grievously painful stories, come to know and respect each other. She becomes like Mother Ireland (Cathleen ni Houlihan) to him, and he becomes to her like the child that she never had, the one she aborted.

It is a book that is about understanding and forgiveness, a theme amazingly and ultimately spoken through the voice of the aborted child itself. In the first chapter, this dead child's spirit hates her mother and wants her to suffer, but in the end, she understands and forgives. That is what the child prays for in the end, understanding and forgiveness.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spare Prose and Extraordinary Power, February 3, 2001

By 

James Carragher (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The House of Splendid Isolation: A Novel (Mass Market Paperback)

Edna O'Brien in general and this very fine novel in particular deserve a much greater readership. The plot here -- IRA fugitive, McGreevy, hides out in the crumbling home of an aged widow, Josie -- is the simple premise on which O'Brien builds a vertiginous, multi-layered tale of fatefully intersecting interpersonal and national histories. The third person narrative points of view are multiple and, especially in the quick cuts to those on the fugitive's trail, occasionally confusing. McGreevy and Josie are both superbly drawn and utterly convincing, although their emotional linkage is achieved too quickly, just as the flashbacks to Josie's horrid marriage make her reveries of quiet good times with her husband scarcely credible. The prose is spare, with no wasted words, and one of the wonders of this novel is that O'Brien nonetheless thoroughly conveys the lushness of the drizzly Irish countryside, the complexity of the struggle and the underlying sense of national unity that all the characters -- no matter how harshly at war with one another -- feel. And she has packaged all that in what is also from start to finish a superbly suspenseful tale. The 230 or so pages flash by, making The House of Splendid Isolation an exciting and rewarding one-sitting read.