Customer Reviews

Wild Decembers

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a lovely, sad song of a book. You know from the start the story will end tragically, but you keep reading, just like you keep listening to a sad song. Because it is beautiful. The beauty of each sentence, each paragraph keeps you reading and after you've read the last page it stays with you like the melody of a song you can't get out of your head.

I heard a fascinating interview with the author on NPR and immediately went online to buy this novel. What a wonderful read! This is a passionate tale about love and duty, honor and sex, fidelity and family. Every single character (& there are dozens) is drawn fully and deeply, even those characters who appear only for a few pages. The story is a simple one with its routes in "Romeo and Juliet:" two families forever at war even after they've forgotten why they are feuding. It is also a story of a small town in Ireland and every single one of its inhabitants and how they effect the three principal characters: Joseph, a farmer, and his sister Breege who falls in love with Mick Bugler, a stranger from Australia, and how their love for one another changes everyone's life. You cannot help but know that the story will end tragically, but because you care for each of the principal chararacters so much and because Edna O'Brien refuses to label some good and others bad, you keep hoping for the inevitable to be put off. O'Brien is obviously influenced by James Joyce: her language is at all times ripe and imaginative and wonderfully descriptive. Her prose also reminds me of William Faulkner and the way he had of burrowing deep into the minds and souls of his complex people. This is certainly one of the finest contemporary novels I have read in many years.

As so memorably demonstrated in "Down By The River"(1997), few limn Irish life as authentically as Edna O'Brien. Add tothat realism her singing prose, which frames each scene with the myths, mystery and madness of Eire, and the result is pure enchantment. Ms. O'Brien is blessed with a cinematographer's eye and boundless original expression, whether she is bringing to life a dance, he is "steering her solemnly, as if she were an ocean liner in her peppermint green," or anger, "She is driving recklessly, her cabbage crown askew, the little bubble car like a cauldron because of her invective." It is with such delicious narrative embellishments that the author introduces us to a rural Irish village, Cloontha, "a locality within the bending of an arm." It is here that "Fields mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too." Joseph Brennan and his much younger sister, Breege, live here and work the dairy farm their family has held for generations. Self-educated and proud of it, Joseph takes part in a battle of wits with the local school master and wins. He works hard, overcoming the vicissitudes of weather by dint of backbreaking toil. Yet, he would change nothing if he could because Cloontha is God to him. "God," he declared, "was not a bearded man in the sky but here....in Cloontha, especially at night, alone with nature." But Joseph is not alone on his mountain for long because Mick Bugler, a shepherd from Australia, arrives to claim recently inherited acreage. It is land Joseph believed was his. There is, of course, a struggle between the two men as contretemps turns to barroom brawl and eventually escalates to a courthouse battle, in which solicitors are the primary victors. This territorial dispute is exacerbated by Breege's attraction to Mick, an emotion that concerns, confounds, and, finally, overcomes her. She is also distressed by an awareness that her brother's obsession with driving Mick off "his mountain" may be the undoing of them all. "....she knew that he was entering a zone in which dreaming and waking, wrongs and semi-wrongs, would be translated and magnified into an enormity to suit the dark mad mould of his thinking." Add to the fracas a dotty, unforgettable old derelict, Crock Hanrahan, who misses little and instigates much as he "goes his way, hopping and bopping across the fields, laughing his mirthless laugh......his body like a sack of potatoes inflating and deflating, depending on whether he was in hill or hollow." We also meet two of the most lascivious sisters to be found in literature - strumpets who sell their favors not for pounds but for land and livestock. Rita "was the brains and Reena the nymphet. She made the deals, bought and sold cattle, and harangued her friendly solicitor to write letters to make hell for this person or that who got in her way." Their seduction of Mick is one of the most risible and erotic scenes to be found. It's reminiscent of some of Joyce's finest rollicking moments. Although the tale's conclusion is adumbrated from its beginning the masterful Ms. O'Brien casts it memorably. Edna O'Brien is a treasure. Wild Decembers is one more triumph.

Joseph Brennan and his sister Breege have always lived in Cloontha, Ireland just like generations of Brennans before them. Joseph remains a bachelor because no woman can compete with his love for the land. Their close relationship changes when the Brennan siblings meet Australian Mick Bugler, who has recently inherited a nearby farm from a deceased relative.

Joseph and Mick initially get along quite well until the ancestral dispute between their families over land drives a wedge between them. However, Breege is attracted to the handsome newcomer who admits he has a fiancee waiting for him Down Under. As she falls in love with the Australian, she tries to reconcile the differences between Mick and her beloved brother, who will do anything to keep his innocent sister from being hurt by the "Despoiler."

WILD DECEMEBR is an excellent character-driven piece that will thrill fans of relationship dramas. The splendid story line is entertaining, as Ireland becomes vividly alive through the writer's pen. The three prime protagonists are fully developed so the audience understands their motives even as Edna O'Brien keeps her plot consistent to their individualism and their interrelationships. Readers who enjoy an Irish relationship drama will gain immense pleasure from Ms. O'Brien's novel.

Harriet Klausner

The remote fields and mountains of Western Ireland in Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel may be hauntingly beautiful, but they're haunted as well.

Overlaid with a grid of legal claims and counter-claims, this land has been sown with centuries of resentment and violence as rival families have fought each other with lawsuits and gunshots "in the name of honour [sic] and land and kindred and blood." Even the tiniest piece of land can be the bone of contention sticking in someone's throat. "Wild Decembers" brilliantly and poetically captures the brooding power of this murky past as it poisons the lives of three young farmers: Joe Brennan, his sister Breege, and the man who changes both their lives forever, Mick Bugler.

Mick has returned to Ireland from sheep farming in Australia to restore inherited land for himself and his fiancee. But every step he takes embroils him in legal disputes with Joe over access to parcels of land he claims are his but Joe says were long since deeded away to the Brennans. Their families have been at odds for generations, and that quicksand of hatred inexorably draws both of them under, first erupting in a bar room brawl, even while they sometimes try to be civil with each other.

Violence broods over every page, even the most beautiful or comical (the book is filled with eccentrics). And all of it takes place as if on stage, since the entire populace of the nearby town is studying their entanglement and wondering how dreamy, suppressed Breege feels about the both of them.

Joe and Mick's enmity nearly destroys Breege's mind as she's torn between family loyalty and a burgeoning wild love for Mick that brings her fully to life for the first time. O'Brien's evocation of her longing, excitement and shame is at times almost breathtakingly intense and beautiful. And overall, there's hardly a page where you won't want to read a passage aloud to marvel over. O'Brien's skillful mix of letters and shifting viewpoints makes the story all the more intimate and dramatic as we enter the dark corners of three stifled lives on the point of exploding.

The prose is virile, sinuous, startling, immediate--whirling you up into the sky with birds, across a field with a terrified rabbit,and down tumbling streams. And through O'Brien's magic, the stifled hopes of the book's three main characters flare up so intensely you feel singed by their passion and stunned by their reversals. "Wild Decembers" is a gorgeously written and heartbreaking novel, one of the most powerful I've read in years.

Edna O'Brien has chosen the Irish countryside as a source of inspiration, although for decades she has been away from the land, only visiting from time to time. In her memoir, "Mother Ireland", there is a statement many expats can identify with:

"Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds with other nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death." p. 129

It's not that some traumatic events have left an irremovable scar on one's personality. We can't forget the culture we were born into, because we are defined by our heritage, and our thinking, our identity is shaped by our Vaterland. For years the writer has suffered bitter comments coming from the natives of the Emerald Island, her own ilk - comments that denied her the right to write, as if there was an obligation to be chained to the land to be able to write about its inhabitants. Indeed, sometimes to see things in a proper perspective, you have to leave your environment. In the age of global information and easy transport, there is no external obstacle that would hamper the ability to relate to the land left behind. Some of the greatest works of the world literature were conceived on emigration. It's thus obvious that the value of the book depends only on the individual talent of the author. In the case of Edna O'Brien, there is no lack of the latter.

"Wild Decembers" is yet another novel set in the provincial world of Irish villagers. As usual, O'Brien purveys the darker side of humanity. In small communities of the countryside, any newcomer is under suspicion on the basis that newcomers are not to be trusted, for there is no complete information about him on the part of the villagers. That fact alone leaves them uneasy, and even if pure good-naturedness makes them treat him with respect, he is always to be blamed should anything happen. Obviously, sooner or later something is bound to happen, and guided by pure instinct, the community turns against the intruder, much like in any community, whether human, or that of animals. Such are the laws of nature, and the smaller the community, the more likely it is to conform to these laws. The urbane world of metropolies compared th the countryside seems like another planet, where one is allowed the simple comfort of anonymity. There is no anonymity to be enjoyed in a village; its inhabitants live under an umbrella of the extended family, and the black sheep, the dissenters, are not to be tolerated. The drama begins when the feelings enter the stage, as is the case with young Breege, whose brother has about a hundred bones to pick with Michael Bugler, the newcomer. The former two live in an almost incestuous relationship, where the brother assumed the position of a husband, whose divine right, as understood by generations of villagers, is to control every move of the wife, and to accept or decline every decision she is trying to make. The point is, that small misunderstandings, which might be resolved on the spot, were there a minimal willingness to cooperate - those petty events and quarrels take the form of a conflict of immense dimensions, where the village as a whole are sometimes more or less active participants, yet always willing to play the role of spectators, the mental descendants of the Roman mob filling the circus to the brink. In "Wild Decembers", Edna O'Brien analyzes the sources of this everlasting newcomer problem, tries to identify its causality, and does so with success. One of the most interesting aspects of this particular novel is the emphasis put on pride and vanity. Prejudice against newcomers can easily evaporate, if the latter are agreeable enough, but what can't be done away with is the human pride, an overblown "sense of honor", so to speak.

Books by this author may not be uplifting, but if you are able to reconcile yourself with this fact, there is a wealth of cultural information to be learned from her works, not to mention the sheer pleasure of reading the unique language of Edna O'Brien.

After reading O'Brien's Trilogy, I couldn't relax and enjoy this novel because I've begun to expect every page turn to reveal a depressing downer. It turned out to be not quite as bad, but hardly uplifting. I suspect that Edna O'Brien is trying to make Ireland and the Irish "pay" for mistreating her, by making most of her characters into a nasty collection of knitting mistakes.

Wild Decembers is different than her Trilogy in another important way: O'Brien proves her skill as a writer. This is definitely masterful, evocative writing. Here I can see where she got her reputation whereas before I wondered.

It is said that once you leave Ireland, you're no longer Irish. Conversely, when I was in the Republic a dozen years ago, I was told repeatedly that there was no longer any distinction based on origin. "If you're here, you're Irish." (That's one really good attitude that solves the corrosive though understandable hatred problem.) So Mick Bugler - whose male forebears had come with an invading force - returns from being a sheep rancher in Australia, wanting to claim lands. Trouble is, he seems to play an endemic game of claiming as much as possible to see how much he can get. Constantly nibbling, pushing. Meanwhile his neighbor/victims are a brother - sister combo. O'Brien skillfully hones the characters and relationships. Can you blame young Breege for wanting a man? There are few opportunities in this underpopulated countryside. She sees Bugler, gradually becomes fascinated. Can you blame her brother for fearing her loss? He has dowsed his natural instincts while bringing up this young orphaned sister. O'Brien, of course, brings the whole affair to her usual morose end. But it is beautifully written.

It amost seems as if the Irish were given a greater canvas to paint their emotions on than other folks. From the first chapter you are absolutely enthralled, captivated, reading faster and faster, you know, just like a great read makes you do. And what a great read this is... well, without giving away the storyline, I'll just say as an avid reader of 3 books a week. I'd rate this one at a tie with O'dell's ' Back Roads' and Brauner's 'Love songs of the tone deaf. I'm serious, get this book and enjoy yourself for a few hours!

I usually love to read about books set in Ireland where the countryside is always greener than green and the dampness wetter than wet. So it was this love that inspired me to read my first Edna O'Brien novel. Set in Western Ireland in the small town of Cloontha, the story follows the quest for land and the acknowledgement of who is the rightful owner. This is an age old problem passed down through generations and, as O'Brien writes, "fields mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too." But she also writes that "the enemy came in the night but the enemy can come at any hour....because the enemy is ALWAYS THERE."

This is how the story begins with the arrival of the enemy -- a brick red tractor that has shown up on the fields, stuck as it was in the mud, with a driver aboard -- one Michael Bugler, noted to be a fine speciman of a man. Is it the tractor who is the enemy or the passenger? Bugler has come to claim land that he has recently inherited. There is one problem though -- part of this land is on what Joseph Brennan considers to be "his mountain". The second problem is that Joseph Brennan has a beautiful sister named Breege who has become giddy over the arrival of the new tractor and its driver. O'Brien writes that "the tractor was music to her ears and a gall to her brother's."

What follows is a fight for land, a fight for love and a struggle to keep one's sanity when all else around you has gone haywire.

Edna O'Brien writes a story laced with impending doom. You know something will happen....you just don't know how bad it will be. As she tells us, "one mad minute stretches into a lifetime." That quote is so true because you can be a model citizen for 364 days of the year and do something bad on that 365th day and the goodness is forgotten and all that remains is that one bad day.

As much as I like stories set in Ireland, this one dragged for me. I felt no kinship to the characters and, while I understood their motivations, I felt no empathy toward them. Yes, "the warring sons of warring sons are sent to repossess ground gone forever" and I'm sure love triangles and tragedy are part of the scenario. I just didn't walk away from this reading experience with any sense of satisfaction in having read this book. This is just my humble opinion and I have rated this book solely based on my enjoyment factor...certainly no indication of the author's ability as a writer.

This is a great book! If you like Edna O'Brien, you'll love this, especially the complex characters, the tight plot, and the inevitable climax.