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review

Over her storied career, author Edna O’Brien has established herself as a powerful female voice.

I began reading Edna O'Brien when I was in my teens, the same age as the protagonists of her luminous coming-of-age trilogy that begins with the infamous novel The Country Girls. Recently, I listened to that same novel as an audiobook, read by the author. O'Brien's voice sounds elderly but strong.

She has a subtle Irish brogue, most audible in moments of great passion or humour. The age in O'Brien's voice – a throaty waver – adds an extra layer to the novel, the distance of a bemused but wise narrator casting back. These novels should be read aloud.

O'Brien is a master of voice. Her writing is lit with the lilt that flickers through ordinary Irish speech. But this accidental beauty is heightened, torqued and flashing in her prose.

As with the careers of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, I have seen in O'Brien's career a powerful, long-lasting female voice of tremendous insight and vision, especially when it comes to the lives of girls and women.

So, I found myself bristling when I read the blurb by Philip Roth on the cover of O'Brien's new novel The Little Red Chairs: "The great Edna O'Brien has written her masterpiece."

O'Brien is 85 years old and she has been writing masterpieces since 1960. The Country Girls is hilariously funny and dead serious about the lack of sexual freedom in the repressive Ireland of the 1950s. It's not a stretch to imagine her slim novel played a prominent part in provoking massive changes concerning attitudes about female desire across that country, and everywhere that English literature is read. In the wake of that revolutionary debut, O'Brien has written more than 20 books of fiction, four works of non-fiction and five stage plays.

Really, then? It is only at 85 that this writer gets down to her masterpiece?

But this initial response to Roth's blurb was, of course, how I felt before I read The Little Red Chairs. As with all of O'Brien's writing, this novel is unerring in terms of an ear for dialogue, lean and yet drenched in sensuous imagery, uninhibited about desire and clear-eyed about the vulnerability of women who fall for illicit love. As with much of O'Brien's writing, there is the Greek-chorus-like power of small-town gossip to destroy independent women.

But the reach of this novel is far darker than most of O'Brien's subject matter, and there is something courageous in her willingness to engage with such horror.

The novel centres around a stranger who takes up residence in a small village in Ireland. He has a long white beard and black robes and describes himself, at various times, as a priest or monk, New Age doctor, sexual healer and poet. He ingratiates himself with the villagers. For instance, he applies hot stones to the back of Sister Bonaventure who visits his clinic in order to experience a spiritual freedom she has not felt since her youth. A young married woman, Fidelma McBride, falls in love with the doctor and convinces him to impregnate her, because she longs for a child.

The village forms its opinions about the doctor. They are unreservedly adoring. The character of Doctor Vladimir Dragan is ripe for comedic puncturing, with his flowing beard, New Age cures and promises of sexual healing.

O'Brien can be a merciless comic when it comes to skewering pretensions and phonies, but the gleeful satire the reader might expect does not materialize; there follows no punchline. Doctor Vladimir Dragan is not ripped apart with the brilliant comedy O'Brien often employs – and this open-ended joke begins to feel sinister.

Soon the reader comes to understand Doctor Vlad is a war criminal, based on the real-life Radovan Karadzic, who is also known as the Beast of Bosnia. (Just over a week ago, an international criminal tribunal at The Hague sentenced Karadzic to a 40-year sentence for crimes against humanity.)

The list of horrors perpetrated by Karadzic is difficult to consider. Except, O'Brien does consider them. The titular little red chairs are the 11,541 chairs set out in Sarajevo to commemorate those who died in the siege during the early 1990s.

O'Brien's omniscient narrator roves and flits through the minds of numerous characters. One moment we hear the story from the voice of a child refugee, Mujo, originally from Sarajevo, who has escaped to Ireland. Mujo recognizes Dr. Dragan and is instrumental in having him arrested. We hear the thoughts of the doctor himself, who imagines that he is a powerful war hero and poet. We are party to the thoughts of Fidelma as she is sexually assaulted with a crowbar and left for dead by former friends of the war criminal. The scene is reminiscent of Faulkner's Sanctuary, in terms capturing the nightmarish horror of violent sexual assault.

And we follow Fidelma to London, where she tries to escape the trauma of her attack and the claustrophobic, condemning eyes of her small village.

In a stylistic move that is nakedly affecting, we hear the voices of the city's disenfranchised, refugees of all sorts, displaced persons, the poor, those barely hanging on. We catch these souls in ordinary acts: scraping the candle wax off the candle sconces in a church. Putting on a Wellington, applying makeup, talking about work, about children left behind in countries of origin, family members tortured, neighbours turning against neighbours. They are "night people" – working shifts of menial labour while the city sleeps. They are a step away from being "ghosts." Here they are rendered with tenderness.

In reading this novel I was reminded of a work by the Canadian sound artist Janet Cardiff that was exhibited in the Rooms in St. John's in 2006. The piece was called The Forty Part Motet and consisted of 40 audio speakers set in a circle at the height of a gallery-goer's ear. Each speaker broadcast an individual singer's voice.

If you stood close to one of the speakers, you heard a single voice of a choir, singing a part of choral work written in 1573. If you stood in the middle of the circle the voices blended together into a single voice of prayer.

The effect – as many art reviewers have recorded – caused the listener to be overwhelmed by the beauty and sadness. Gallery-goers standing in the centre of those voices found themselves unexpectedly bursting into tears.

This is also the effect Edna O'Brien achieves in her most recent masterpiece, The Little Red Chairs.

Lisa Moore is a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her first novel for young readers, Flannery, will be published in May.

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