So much still left to lose

Next year bestselling author Edna O’Brien will turn 90, yet her writing continues to court controversy.

Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped from their school in Dapchi, in the northeastern state of Yobe, wait to meet the Nigerian president in Abuja in March 2018.

In 1960 Edna O’Brien published a novel that LP Hartley called “the skittish story of two Irish nymphomaniacs”. It was matchless endorsement in 1960 when nymphomaniac sounded dirty and thrilling. The Country Girls ­became a bestseller and O’Brien, vilified from one end of Ireland to the other, became infamous there and famous everywhere else. So she moved permanently to England where she has continued to be famous and only periodically vilified.

Next year O’Brien will turn 90, yet she has the trick of eternality at hand. She is never less than the marvellous girl who wrote The Country Girls in a mere three weeks. And here she is still being the marvellous girl in a novel called Girl.

Girl is not her usual imaginative geographical territory: it is not about the Irish or Ireland, nor about love, sex and the ­impossibility of male and female understanding one another. It is about O’Brien’s other great subject: loss. The narrator in Girl has lost everything. And having lost everything she still has more to lose.

“I was a girl once, but not any more.” With these steely words, the initially unnamed narrator begins her story.

Girl, a novel by Edna O'Brien.

O’Brien always has an ardent interest in the world at large; politics, power, how these function at the broader levels as well as in the individual lives carried by the forces of history. This is what happened: in 2014 276 adolescent girls were kidnapped by the Nigerian terrorists Boko Haram.

O’Brien’s narrator is one of these girls, one of the few who ­escaped, although escape has the meaning and shape of an ectoplasm in this context.

Most of the kidnapped girls were Christian. They were sleeping in the dormitories of their secondary state school where their parents had sent them, often at great hardship, so they could have better lives.

This story so shook O’Brien that, despite her age, she travelled twice to Nigeria to see and hear for herself what was really happening beneath the huff and puff of the powerful men running the country. The lives of these girls seemed to be of such small consequence to anyone except the Hollywood stars who val­iantly tried to keep them in the global eye.

What O’Brien saw and heard on the ground is reported in the background tales that the narrator hears and repeats. These tales give context and heft to the girl’s piercing story. In some places woe isn’t extraordinary after all.

On that soft summer night of late childhood the girls are taken on trucks into the jungle camps of these violent men. ­Unspeakable men. Childhood stopped in a heartbeat. In the morning the narrator, a clever girl who writes prize-winning ­essays and had hopes of making her parents proud of her, is ­seared by the words of the fanatical leader.

She drops to the ground, insensible but visionary: “The earth on which I knelt was strewn with half-eaten hearts and there were cut throats littered everywhere, the blood gurgling away like an endless stream … The small grip I had on reason was gone. We would have cut our own throats if we had knives.’’

Later the girls are mass raped. “When it was over we staggered back, sore, baffled. We were too young to know what had happened, or what to call it.’’

If the men are unspeakable, the tale of the girl should be unimaginable, but O’Brien doesn’t flinch. She finishes this tale of horror with the line: “It was dark now and stars were feasting in the heavens.’’ Feasting? The girls suffer and the world goes on ­regardless. And it does more. It displays its glory and pitilessness. O’Brien, like Thomas Hardy, knows everything there is to know about rendering pity.

The girls are seen and treated as objects for men crazed with drugs, guns and dominance. Each night they are “plundered’’ by six or seven men. Their photos are taken as they are being raped as proof of life in supposed negotiations with the outside world.

Some girls are sold as slaves across borders for small amounts of money, others sold for more into Saudi Arabia. Some stay in various moving jungle camps. A few convert. Some die.

In the jungle there are no laws except the acts defining the needs, the desires of the men. The physical jungle keeps the girls imprisoned.

The girl is chosen by a soldier called Mahmoud and they are quickly married. He tells her he enlisted to save his family but now belongs to the sect. The girl is grateful she no longer has to endure the mass raping and soon finds herself pregnant. It is ­because of this man that the girl with her baby and her friend are eventually able to escape into the jungle.

And this is where her further journey begins. A journey into loss, one life unravelling in a series of devastations and betrayals. O’Brien’s austere story turns out to be a wider inquiry into corruption and politics at the highest levels as well as at the lowest.

The city is a different jungle but the violence of men is the same in both. Girl is instructive. It shows how art, fiction can move you in a way simple facts, steady reportage cannot. Anyone who reads this will recalibrate what she knows about this most terrible and continuing tale.

O’Brien shares with Toni Morrison the need to speak for those who are voiceless. Her genius for the intimate and imaginative voice, exciting and recognisable in The Country Girls, ­remains magnificent.

Like Morrison, she is unafraid to display her own vulnerability and maybe this is the basis of integrity in her art. O’Brien will not be welcome in Nigeria. The powerful will consider her too controversial. But controversial is O’Brien’s natural state despite the showers of awards that are falling about her shoulders.

This exemplary novel is a reminder that the fates of 111 girls who have been kidnapped by Boko Haram are still ­unknown. Girl is also a mighty reply, a stinging slap to those who like to boast they never read fiction.

Helen Elliott is a writer and critic.

Girl
By Edna O’Brien
Faber, 240pp, $29.99