In the Forest by Edna O'Brien

Real horrors in an Irish town have bred a superbly troubling novel, says Patricia Craig

218pp

Edna O'Brien has already come under heavy fire in Ireland for appropriating a shocking recent event – a triple murder in Cregg Wood, Co Clare – and re-creating it as a work of fiction without due concern for the feelings of those closest to the victims. It's only eight years, the argument goes, since the bodies of Imelda Riney, her small son Liam, and a local priest, Father Joe Walsh, were uncovered by horrified searchers in the dark wood where the so-called Kinderschreck, the scourge of the district, had been about his deadly activity.

The complaint about In the Forest appears to be that insufficient dust has been allowed to settle over the killings; and that, in this respect, it is unlike a work, such as Eoin McNamee's The Blue Tango (2001), which deals, factually and imaginatively, with the Co Antrim murder of 19-year-old Patricia Curran back in 1952. In this reading, any attempt to impose a fictional outline over the Cregg Wood atrocities can only stir up grief for the local community, as well as those more intimitely involved.

However, the O'Brien novel, with its economy of style, its lyrical moments and inexorable drift, achieves what no journalistic lamentation or public outcry could hope to do. It adds up to a memorial to innocence and beauty wantonly destroyed, whether the innocence of the murdered young woman and child, or that of the woodland itself, contaminated beyond recovery by the horrors it encompassed.

Yet In the Forest is a novel, with all the novel's clairvoyance and power to illuminate. The ravaged tapestry of its events is unfolded with tact and artistry. It uses symbol, myth and local lore to the fullest extent. A disturbed young hoodlum, Michan O'Kane, released from prison in England, returns to the scene of his upbringing. He gets started on a trail of thievery, arson and destructiveness, menacing everyone and everything in sight: dogs, cars, ponies, shopgirls, retired policemen, his sister, his grandmother. It's as if all the badness inherent in the community is concentrated in the bedevilled figure of O'Kane. He is left on the loose, and even helped with gifts of food, left outside as one might feed a wretched stray.

This is a grim story, but the novel has a buoyancy and luminosity detached from its central desolation. It gets to grips with women's camaraderie, the colourful, slightly offbeat Ireland of the Nineties, pub sessions, Easter customs, a mildly festive atmosphere. But the darkness is massing. The charming young single mother with her long red hair, Eily Ryan in the novel, has taken the fatal step of renting an isolated house, formerly a hideout of the Kinderschreck who – watching from the undergrowth – is infatuated, then infuriated.

The course of the drama is set, as in some distorted fairy tale. Demented, vicious, in the grasp of an enormous spite, O'Kane embodies terminal maladjustment to the extent that his half-baked, incoherent alienation is very hard to stomach. For all that, In the Forest, with its pungency and poignancy, makes a rich addition to the literature of the malignant.

Patricia Craig's biography of Brian Moore is published this autumn by Bloomsbury