Edna O’Brien’s Little Red Chairs evokes horrors of Bosnia

Edna O’Brien’s protagonist Vlad Dragan is based on Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb ex-leader accused of war crimes.

Bosnian Muslims — Radovan Karadzic’s primary victims — on the move in 1995. Picture: AP

It is a dark night in winter when the man appears out of nowhere: a white-bearded stranger in a long black coat standing at the edge of Cloonoila, a remote village on the west coast of Ireland. We don’t know where he’s come from or why he’s turned up at this isolated place.

If the natural world is suspicious of his presence — dogs are heard ‘‘barking crazily’’ and strange birds sing — the villagers are not. They welcome him, this figure who goes by the name of Dr Vladimir Dragan. But they are charmed at their peril.

So begins Edna O’Brien’s disturbing new novel The Little Red Chairs, the title drawn from the public commemoration of the siege of Sarajevo where ‘‘11,541 red chairs were laid out in rows along the eight hundred metres of the Sarajevo high street. One empty chair for every Sarajevan killed during … the siege’’.

The pleasure of this novel lies in its unevenness, as we shift from a dream to a conversation to a dramatic scene. It therefore takes time to make the connection between the siege of Sarajevo and Vlad, as he prefers to be called, who presents himself to the village as a healer and sex therapist.

A learned and charismatic figure, he takes a room in the village and sets up shop. Although the locals are wary of his New Age practices, their curiosity draws them in and it is the women, above all, who begin to visit.

The opening chapters of the novel circumnavigate this new presence: the baton of consciousness is passed from one villager to another, as each one observes the newcomer. In the process, we learn of the village community and the history of its inhabitants. There is Fifi communing with her dead husband; barman Dara telling of his family’s suffering through the Irish Civil War; and Fidelma, the town beauty, stuck in a loveless marriage and desperately craving a child.

After the poise of these opening chapters, in which attention is rationed and knowledge sparse, we are dropped swiftly into a giveaway: Vlad is a war criminal fleeing capture, the mastermind behind the siege of Sarajevo, his character based on the former Bosnian Serb leader accused of genocide, Radovan Karadzic.

If the reader is privy to this knowledge, the villagers are not. We, like the dogs and the birds, sense the terrible events yet to come. O’Brien’s eye homes in on the wet and the visceral, reminding us of the carnage of the past: when ­Fidelma bends down to pray, she kneels “at the water’s slobbery edge”, and the first suggestion of Vlad’s violent nature emerges as he observes “a juicy pink worm … and … has a terrible instinct to tread on it, to squash it’’.

This power attracts: Fidelma is drawn to Vlad and the novel slowly sharpens its focus to rest its attention on their relations. Fidelma doesn’t yet know of Vlad’s history, and we wait to see whether she’ll be brought down by their affair.

Vlad’s past does indeed catch up with Fidelma, but not in a way we might expect. It is hard to talk of this book without referring to two middle scenes that describe violence so extreme that it’s difficult to read.

Fidelma doesn’t have an especially strong presence to begin with: she is passive and subject to the powers of men — to the charm of Vlad and the muted aggression of her husband. The violence she experiences has the odd effect of both dismantling and crowning her; as a person she disintegrates, and yet a kind of narrative grandeur is bestowed on her character because of what she has suffered. Her life is reduced to the ever-magnified memory of this act.

With this book O’Brien has made her motives clear. In a recent interview with The Guardian, she said she ‘‘wanted to make a human story and … an intimate story’’ about ‘‘the incalculably awful things that I see and hear on television every night’’. The aim was to craft a narrative around ‘‘the evil done and the evildoer not made responsible, or not even feeling responsible’’.

The evildoer here is Vlad, of course. The problem, however, is that in Vlad’s disregard of his wrongdoing he is reduced to a simple and unfeeling figure. His motives are simple, his story is handed over without any internal struggle. His coldness doesn’t compel, and as a result the narrative frays at the point when it is expected to bear most weight.

The weight here is a moral one. For a book whose subject matter deals with the problem of evil — its capacity to magnetise and infect — things are often reduced to good versus bad, the victim versus the criminal: Vlad and Fidelma are characters whose existence is justified by the violence they have committed or the violence they have suffered.

All this troubles me because what I end up remembering, what stays with me, are those two middle scenes of extreme violence. These scenes dominate; they are excruciatingly vivid. Yet without them the book seems thin. What do we remember of a novel recently read? It is inevitable some scenes stand out more than others; this is the logic of narrative. But does it matter if the things we most swiftly recall are scenes of awful violence — scenes that play and replay in the mind, with everything else reduced to this? Is bearing witness to ‘‘incalculably awful things’’ more complex than simply repeating those awful things?

There seems a fine line here between the valid need to honour the memory and consequences of war-related sufferings, and maximising the representation of such violence to galvanise a story. What do I do with the memory of these scenes? What are such scenes for? My urge here is to defer to JM Coetzee — described by O’Brien as her ‘‘greatest model for writing’’ — and his character Elizabeth Costello, who in debating the ‘‘problem of calling evil a problem’’ staunchly refuses to accept that the depiction of such violence serves as a cautionary tale.

Costello has grown wary of the electrical ‘‘leap’’ of evil: ‘‘Once upon a time she would have said, All honour to a writer who undertakes to follow such a story to its darkest recesses. Now she is not sure.’’

Stephanie Bishop’s latest novel is The Other Side of the World.

The Little Red Chairs

By Edna O’Brien

Faber, 320pp, $29.99