O’Brien is eighty-five years old, and praising this novel for its ambition, its daring vitality, its curiosity about the present age and about the lives of those displaced by its turbulence shouldn’t be mistaken for the backhanded compliment that all this is remarkable given the author’s advanced age. It’s simply a remarkable novel.
In the end, what leaves one in humbled awe of The Little Red Chairs is O’Brien’s dexterity, her ability to shift without warning — like life — from romance to horror, from hamlet to hell, from war crimes tribunal to midsummer night’s dream. And through it all, she embeds the most perplexing moral challenge ever conceived in the struggles of one lonely, middle-aged woman who just wanted a baby but now wanders the earth along with so many others, 'craving the valleys and small instances of mercy.'”
O’Brien is not interested in sensationalizing her material, and The Little Red Chairs is not a novel of suspense, still less a mystery or a thriller; it is something more challenging, a work of meditation and penance. How does one come to terms with one’s own complicity in evil, even if that complicity is 'innocent'?
Edna O’Brien’s new novel, her first in a decade, has already been hailed as 'her masterpiece' by that master-of-them-all Philip Roth. And he’s right. This is a spectacular piece of work, massive and ferocious and far-reaching, yet also at times excruciatingly, almost unbearably, intimate. Holding you in its clutches from first page to last, it dares to address some of the darkest moral questions of our times while never once losing sight of the sliver of humanity at their core.
But there aren’t a lot of perspective-changing insights here. O’Brien doesn’t really illuminate the nature of evil in a book that seems badly to want to. This is owing in part to Vlad and Fidelma’s being the least interesting characters in the novel ... These objections aside, The Little Red Chairs has much to recommend it: beautiful writing, immense ambition, a vivid cast of supporting characters, and a rigorous humanitarian ethos. But we want to have been better beguiled, more intricately and subtly seduced by the author’s imaginative power.?
Edna O’Brien apparently researched this novel carefully: it shows in the variety of stories and range of reference and facts. It does not show, however, in authenticity of character and voice: these spring from her own vast experience and writerly imagination. None of the moments O’Brien adapts or borrows, even from Kafka and Shakespeare, is as piercing as the moments she invents herself.
It is remarkable that O'Brien captures an extraordinary and almost holy innerness in each of her characters, however minor, and then plants those characters amidst the terrible velocity, the terrible pull of world events. O'Brien is truly at her best when she describes the private corners of minds, those quiet and wild corners, our meditative and our inspired selves.
The surreal setup allows O’Brien to unfold a series of witty and well-observed set pieces ... What is startling about O’Brien’s portrait of all this feminine yearning and dissatisfaction is the way she manages to convey the sense that the spiritualism to which they turn is both entirely bogus and completely necessary ... Fidelma’s precarious status as both victim and perpetrator allows O’Brien to explore questions of responsibility and collusion, and the extent to which comfortable living in the West depends on discomfort, murder, and torture elsewhere ... But there is something about the characters themselves, and their relationships, which feels dated.
Frequent switches of tense and vignettes that start midaction create a sense that characters exist beyond the page. Populated by many memorable voices, the work feels loose and textural, both all-encompassing and personal. It asks the kinds of questions only a novel could dare; like a great novel must, it leaves many of them unanswered.
The Little Red Chairs is both a call to pleasure and duty. O'Brien's undiminished gifts as a storyteller draw us in and then awaken us to the limits of our own blinkered vision, the fragility of our own safe havens.
...halfway through Red Chairs, O’Brien makes an abrupt swerve, whisking Fidelma to London and turning her attention to the plight of refugees among whom Fidelma lives and associates ... Such Bosnian stories nominally tie this often lifeless and diffuse second section of the novel to the capture of Vlad, who will himself re-emerge in a final, even less successful third section, set at The Hague during his war crimes trial.
The novel’s sections occasionally feel discrete from one another, strung out over multiple perspectives and tense shifts; but Fidelma is a triumph, the thread that binds the narrative together. Beautifully crafted, The Little Red Chairs is a bold indictment of violence, played out in one woman’s life, an intimate canvas that expands beyond its frame, filling rooms.
O’Brien’s story telling is raw, and at times graphic. Assaults and abuse are not glazed over. She wants the reader to face the ugly truths that many have suffered at the hands of genocide or painful cultural practices. But the beauty of the prose, which courses effortlessly across the pages, balances the horror of such instances.
Edna O’Brien recognizes that people who watch such atrocities at a distance, including powerful leaders, rarely intervene. Thus, the victims multiply, but the stories they tell have their own healing power. Ms. O’Brien has done more than many governments by giving voice to the dispossessed in this novel of remembrance.
“The Little Red Chairs is a capacious novel full of exquisitely rendered miniatures — the frightened taxi driver who has been hired by the thugs who threaten Fidelma, the garrulous man from Mozambique who hires cleaners at the office building, the eccentric neighbor girl whom Fidelma befriends in London. O’Brien has long been recognized as a gifted short story writer and here she employs her gift for closely observed moments in the service of a novel that is deeply intimate but global in its vision.
