The Light of Evening (Audio CD)

by Edna O'Brien (Author), Dearbhla Molloy (Narrator)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In her 20th work of fiction, O'Brien meditates with haunting lyricism on the lure of home and the compulsion to leave. Dilly, 78 and widowed, lies in a Catholic hospital in rural Ireland waiting for her elder daughter, Eleanora, to arrive at her bedside. In gorgeous stream-of-consciousness from the masterful O'Brien (Lantern Slides), Dilly recalls her early years as well as decades of misunderstanding and conflict with Eleanora. Dilly's past unfolds in fits and starts: she leaves her mother behind in a small village in Ireland to seek a better life in 1920s Brooklyn, returning after a failed affair and the death of her brother, Michael. She promptly marries the rich Cornelius; they settle at Rusheen, his dilapidated family estate, and have two children. For Eleanora's story, O'Brien shifts to the third person: the daughter moves to England, marries an older novelist and begins a successful career as a writer before divorcing him and embarking on a series of affairs with married men, a life that Dilly both envies and scorns. The award-winning O'Brien evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
I first came across Edna O'Brien's work as a teenager when I happened by chance upon a slim though enticing paperback misplaced on a random library shelf. That Saturday afternoon, I found myself thoroughly immersed in the dark and passionate world of Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), its overtures to the classic ballad enveloping a morose tale of murder.

While homicide is not necessarily par for the course in reading O'Brien's novels, she has sundered the human spirit in a myriad other ways over the span of her prolific career. She specializes in portraying the intensely coupled yet disjointed asymmetries of mother and daughter, husband and wife. In the midst of these unholy tangles lurk also the drunken, brutish father, wayward sons and married lovers. And then there's the over-bearing Church with its legion of faithful, ever ready to judge, torment and chasten her scandalous protagonists -- those naive or forceful women who seek to escape the rigors of social convention and rural constraint.

Eleanora, in O'Brien's latest novel, The Light of Evening, is a famous writer, estranged from her mother, Dilly, and from the Irish motherland, whose history, landscape and people she recreates in a contorted act of veneration, at once rebellious disregard and steadfast filial duty. As Dilly lays dying in a Dublin hospital bed, she remembers an earlier life in New York, a lost love and an awkward marriage, and she calls her prodigal daughter home to the family fold.

The novel moves from Dilly's first-person account of her youthful adventures to a collection of scenes from Eleanora's tempestuous life and, finally, to the damning revelations of Eleanora's journal. O'Brien includes within these narratives a number of letters, all of which reveal, to varying degrees, the absolute neediness and utter reproach that mars these characters' ability to connect with those they love. This sentiment is contained in Dilly's last, painful meeting with Eleanora as she "holds her in a tight, clumsy, angry, desperate, loving, farewelling embrace." In the background stands the decaying family home, Rusheen, and Dilly's failed attempt to change her will and pass on the estate to Eleanora.

Faulkner's pithy observation that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" cements the novel's thematic attachments of kinship and land, the tense confluence of past and present. Some critics lament a certain redundancy in O'Brien's endless rewriting of her autobiographical struggles, but I found that the oft-rehearsed sketches of her fictionalized experience -- the bitter demise of conjugal bliss, the demoralizing affairs, the liberating quest for artistic fulfillment -- capture everything that makes her previous work so satisfying, in its contrite, worldly prose and its refusal of easy redemption.

The deliciously absurd interlude of Eleanora's exchange with a London neighbor who bequeaths to her, and then abruptly retracts, the gift of a box containing a wig of once lustrous red hair is O'Brien at her luminous best: "That small transaction an instance of their small lives in their small houses and their small gardens, their hearts contracting day by day, visiting little malices on one another in lieu of their missed happiness."

Given the imaginative terrain of the immigrant's tale, one might presume that Dilly's expatriate episode in the 1920s and her return to Ireland would serve as the novel's major stimulus. Yet the opening sections are somehow sadly lacking. Composed of a series of short vignettes, these moments are flattened into stock tableaus, devoid of the prosaic depth one might attach, for example, to a figurative snapshot simply titled "Ellis Island." Such instances are, like the novel as a whole, imbued with pathos, but they lack the weighty meaning and forceful energy found in some of O'Brien's earlier books.

In this regard, The Light of Evening strains to find a compelling close. While O'Brien is well-versed in capturing the brutality of grief or ennui, the overly constructed attempt to shock the reader at the novel's end, to bring things full circle yet atone for the prologue's epic mode -- "Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers" -- simply doesn't ring true. For O'Brien, the real poetry lies in the silent gesture, what's not said, the failure of communion.

Reviewed by Louise Bernard
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Sound Library (November 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0792744853
• ISBN-13: 978-0792744856
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,811,047 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #53 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( O ) > O'Brien, Edna

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Everything she did was wrong", October 20, 2006

By	M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Light of Evening (Hardcover)

In this poetic story of mothers and daughters and grandmothers, memory and remembrance perpetually shroud and encapsulate the present. As the novel begins, Dilly, a woman of advancing age is told that she must go to Dublin for observation.

Dilly lies in a hospital bed and begins to see her life pass before her in rapid succession, "like clouds - different shapes and different colours, merging and passing one another." As her life is steadily pulled out of her, like pages pulled from a book, she falls into fitful dreams where her chequered past gradually emerges.

Determined to make a new life for herself, away from her domineering mother and the "troubles" of Ireland, Dilly travels to New York to start a new life. After a hellish sea voyage, Dilly is forced to go through Ellis Island where she and the other immigrants are subjected to every kind of humiliation, herded into different groups, names and numbers tagged into chests, the inspectors like hawks, looking for every sickness.

Now in America, a world that seems both strange and carnival-like, "a land of bluff and blighted dreams," Tilly's cousin provides her with a room in a boarding house and employment as a domestic servant in the home of a Mr. and Mrs. McCormack, a bourgeois couple who advocate "nothing but rules."

It is here in this life existing of "crush-proof blouses and coatees and capes stoles and muffs," that Tilly finds her only real friend in fellow maid Solveig and has a love affair with a young man that ends in disaster. Finding New York a place of intense pressure, here "people are always moving on so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could," Tilly's efforts to breakaway from her family are not that successful and she eventually returns to her roots in Ireland where she marries and has a family.

Whilst the bells inside Dilly's head, chime half a century apart, bringing her gradually awake, her mind constantly clogged with "memories and with muddle." The crux of her thinking is always with her family and her children, as she disentangles the hurts they have caused her. Her son Terence has fallen under the influence of a grasping wife and has become as avaricious as she, and her daughter Eleanor has always had her head constantly stuck in the clouds.

Now a talented author, Eleanor earns the distain of Dilly for marrying Hermann, a domineering older man whom Dilly is convinced that her daughter did not love. Eleanor actually confesses that she had eloped in a trance, in haste, her docility a mask.

Even Hermann would always contend that Eleanor had married him under the guise of love, to better her ambitions. By choosing this madman for a husband, Dilly contends that her daughter has driven a last nail in her mother's coffin, the gulf between mother and daughter finally becoming insurmountable.

The novel is a poetic homage to what is left unsaid, where a mother and a daughter have held each other at a distance for so long. Eleanor in particular, is unable to confide, for the very simple reason that she fears she will break down completely if she confesses to her mother just how unhappy she is.

Whilst Dilly seems to find solace in the natural beauty of Rusheen, her family home, the place where her sorrows had multiplied and yet was also so dear to her, Eleanor throws herself headlong into a clandestine affair that does little to assuage her inconsolable grief.

Intricate, deeply compassionate and poetically resonant, The Light of Evening tells of two women held irrevocably apart by the their petty disloyalties and their familial disillusionments.

Although the novel stalls a bit towards the end, as Dilly's almost stream-of-conscious letters seem to take hold of the narrative, the wolves of memory and sorrow continue to echo throughout each generation as author Edna O'Brien continues with her soft, delicate and subtle touch. Mike Leonard October 06.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Brave, difficult, lovely, and heartbreaking, October 27, 2006

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Light of Evening (Hardcover)

The prolific Edna O'Brien's latest novel, THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING, is --- like much of her work --- about place, loss and longing as well as identity and misunderstanding. She acknowledges James Joyce as a strong influence on her prose, and his voice is evident here; this novel is mostly stream of consciousness and deals with subjective memory, not to mention Ireland.

Dilly is dying of cancer, and as she moves toward the end of her life, her mind and heart take her to her past. She remembers her tense relationship with her mother and leaving her small Irish town for America in the 1920s. There she works as a domestic and has a quite typical immigrant experience (poetically and sensitively rendered by O'Brien). She falls in love with a dashing, romantic Irish-American only to have her dream of a life with him thwarted. Dilly returns to Ireland and marries a solid man, prone to heavy drinking, the heir of a crumbling but proud estate. She has two children, a son and a daughter. And it is the relationship between Dilly and her daughter Eleanora on which the book centers.

Dilly and Eleanora, like Dilly and her own mother, have a tense relationship. Eleanora strains under the confines of rural Ireland and longs to leave. She finally does and marries a foreign writer in London, distancing herself from her mother and her Irish roots even further. Eleanora becomes a famous writer herself and, after divorcing her husband, engages in a series of disastrous affairs. As Dilly spends her last days in a Catholic hospital tended to by nuns, she waits for Eleanora to visit. In the meantime, she tells much of her life story to a kind nun who seems convinced that Eleanora's visit will bring reconciliation and closure. But the visit proves tense, anti-climactic and sad. Eleanora flees and leaves behind a journal recording her feelings about her mother, which, of course, Dilly reads. Readers hear the voices of Dilly's mother, Dilly and Eleanora though letters, first-person memories, third-person narrative, and finally, Eleanora's raw and emotional journal.

Surrounded by the nuns, but emotionally and physically far from her family, Dilly's last days are full of longing and regret but also deep love.

Much of THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING seems autobiographical; O'Brien's mother, like Dilly, did leave Ireland in the 1920s for New York where she worked as a maid, and like Eleanora, O'Brien became a controversial writer, reviled and treasured, in her homeland.

O'Brien's novel is at once hyper-emotional and stoic. It is a lyrical and challenging exploration of place and the complicated, not always pleasant, mother/daughter bond. Dilly and Eleanora need each other but also repel each other. They consider themselves to be very different yet their desires and feelings often mirror one another. The men in the novel fall into neat stereotypes (the hero, the drinker, the Irish-American dreamer) and are usually one-dimensional. The women, however, are vivid and heartfelt characters; they are complex, flawed and real. O'Brien successfully weaves into the story the importance of folklore and Catholicism for Irish identity, and in that way further cements her hard-earned reputation as one of the most important contemporary Irish storytellers.

THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING is perhaps not quite as readable or even enjoyable as her recent IN THE FOREST. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful novel --- brave and difficult, lovely and heartbreaking. Readers have come to expect no less from O'Brien.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You can take the author out of Ireland but you can't take Ireland out of the Author, October 6, 2006

By	Juan C. Cordovez (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Light of Evening (Hardcover)

The book is somewhat cryptic and much happens. But you realize three quarters of the way in that the story is not in the actions, but in the unsaid. And there's lots of unsaid.

It's the emotional story of the relationship between mother and daughter. The emotional current of this story is steady and you wonder what lies at the bottom of the conflict. Maybe there is no bottom, just two generations, two views, two worlds.

If you know Ireland, you'll be able to flesh out the sparce description and feel the coldness.

This is also a story about the conflict between modern vs. traditional society in Ireland that few are telling successfully.

The story levies a heavy emotional toll and it is completely satisfying. In the end, I am left wondering why the characters acted the way they did, yet understanding perfectly well the way they feel. There's the contradiction, there's the mystery.