Edna O’Brien (1962) The Lonely Girls. Edna O’Brien (1964) Girls in Their Married Bliss.

Edna O’Brien (1962) The Lonely Girls.

Edna O’Brien (1964) Girls in Their Married Bliss.

Edna O’Brien’s trilogy of books which begins in rural Ireland, moves to Dublin and ends in the less than swinging sixties of London. Kate and Baba against the world. An era of the ‘Angry Young Men’ on stage and screen. But there’s no room for women. Baba steps out of Dublin and into London as easily as she’d change a new jacket at home.

Caithleen/Cait/Kate is never sure about anything. Apart from love. She’s sure about love. She’s just not sure what it is. Eugene Gaillard fits the mould. She prefers older men. He’s sophisticated enough to own a car, and a house, and an ex-wife, and an ex-child, but none of these things matter if you’re in love. Eugene is a film maker. His theme is the suffering of the working masses. Caithleen’s suffering touches him greatly. She’s a great beauty, which he desires. But he’s patient and wily.

Dublin, of course, with its casual misogyny and with more priests-and-nuns per-square mile than the Vatican was a black-and-white checkerboard of Magdalene laundries running at full capacity. Ireland’s shame.

Cait shacking up with Eugene wasn’t treated as a casual fling. Her father was within his rights to shackle and take her home, in disgrace, even though she was 21. Girls are no longer girls. Grown women, but still girlish in the way they think. To be otherwise is to disappear into the Magdalene mist.

I laughed when a parish priest got angry with Cait. He explained her violent and drunken dad had an affliction to do with the Irish weather. Most men drunk because of it. Weather, after all, is god given.  

Baba, having a good time and pregnancy is something neither of them are prepared for.

Lonely Girls is a more knowing book. A more knowing look at what it is to be a woman that desires something more that is always just out of reach.

Girls in Their Married Bliss is a title steeped in irony.

The first two books in the trilogy are narrated by Cait/Kate. The centre cannot hold. Cait’s thoughts and doings are no longer enough to fill a book.

The bold Baba steps into the void. She’s always been up front about what she wanted out of men. Her pragmatism settles on the blow-hard Frank. He reminded me of Spratt, who had a yard in Clydebank. Irish, had a squad of men, with local-authority contracts neatly lined up. He made millions. They were paid buttons and lucky to make it to their next wage, but he was a good sort, laying it on and offering loans. A caravan to sleep in. All the works (docked from their wages).

Cait has lost the plot. She marries Eugene. Any thought she had about romance, well, with a child and no life apart from that, she desires something better. Eugene wants her to remain the same. A man of his time. Everyman?  Cait to be dependent and ever grateful for his greatness. Step aside at your peril.

The fortune teller in the first book called it right. She predicted where their adolescent dreams would end and reality bites. Read on.    

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6