Night by Edna O’Brien
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 16:00 on 7 April 2022
Penguin, 1978, 120 p. First published 1972.

Mary Hooligan has trouble sleeping. The usual remedies – counting sheep or apples, pills – have no effect. The novel is a rendering of her thoughts during one night of such sleeplessness, involving memories of her upbringing in Coose in Connemara, various odd encounters, sometimes scatological, and a multitude of sexual (mis)adventures.
Though I have read neither and so cannot comment, the narration apparently reflects Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses and prefigures Eimear MacBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I’ll take their word for it.
With its focus on one person’s life experience, the novel stands in contrast to O’Brien’s “Country Girls” trilogy. There is no doubting, however, the author’s technical skill as a writer nor her proficiency with words; the book is peppered with Latinate derivations, Irishisms and seeming neologisms (gaimbeaux?) but even so is easy enough to read. Fifty years on from first publication what is striking about the book is its brevity. Nevertheless it says what it needs to say. Economy is a welcome attribute in a writer.
Fair enough it’s only 120 pages worth, but also revealing is the cover price of the edition I read. 75p! Those were the days.
Pedant’s corner:- tête-a-têtes (têtes-a-tête?) “doh ray me fa” (doh re mi fa,) frequent omissions of commas before a piece of direct speech, sherbert (seven lines earlier was the correct ‘sherbet’, with sherbert again a further seven lines on,) jelley (of frog spawn; surely usually spelled ‘jelly’,) “the think I couldn’t endure” (the thing,) seemliness’ (seemliness’s,) she’s (‘she’d’ made more sense,) an opening quote mark that was never closed, Leuwenhoech (Leuwenhoek?) caprolites (coprolites.)