Anyone familiar with that literary landmark will understand McBride’s logic. In one fell swoop, O’Brien’s maiden novel gave voice and colour to an indigenous but stifled creature: burgeoning Irish womanhood.
O’Brien unshackled and emboldened a new generation of female expression using a saga of two small-town girls fleeing convent school for Dublin and negotiating the first blossoms of sexual awakening.
Sally Rooney? O’Brien was doing it at a time when it could get you cancelled in this country.
The slim edition scandalised the baldly neurotic, respectability obsessed rosary-clutchers of a Catholic Ireland now largely consigned to the past. Book bans – and even burnings – ensued (perhaps no greater artistic hallmark on this sorry little island). Overseas, meanwhile, O’Brien’s white-hot literary talent surged her to stardom.
Built around rich archive material and interviews with O’Brien in the final year of her life, Blue Road is a timely mural to a cultural cornerstone who never quite received due gratitude for dragging us into modernity.
For her part, director Sinéad O’Shea (Pray for Our Sinners) finds herself in the company of a gift from the documentary filmmaking gods.
Edna O’Brien never disclosed the identity of the British politician with whom she had a doomed affair. Photo: Getty
O’Brien lived, for better and worse, by her own rules. Thrills, spills, bestsellers and busts, she packed so much drama into her 93 years that it was as if she sought to emulate the chapter-by-chapter plot turns of fiction itself.
That she could impart her reflections (in these interviews or through extensive personal diaries read here by actor Jessie Buckley) with such grandiose eloquence gives this indispensable portrait a sturdy inbuilt narrative pitch. The clue is in the film’s title – the storyteller is now the protagonist.
A somewhat lonely childhood in rural Co Clare is suggested, with O’Brien seeking solace among nature from her alcoholic father’s ruinous gambling habit and mother’s devout Catholicism.
Dublin provides scope for reinvention. A column in a railway magazine gets her writing, before she meets successful Irish-Czech author Ernest Gebler in 1952.
It would be the first of a series of poor choices in male partners that would befall O’Brien. The marriage was defined as much by sons Carlo and Sasha (both of whom contribute here) as bitter rows, especially when O’Brien’s fledgling literary spotlight starts to eclipse Gebler’s.
Newly separated, she then begins a new chapter as a darling of London’s celebrity set. Lavish parties are thrown, champagne is popped and Hollywood film stars are bedded. She becomes an elegant and truth-telling guest on prime-time chat shows.
Edna O’Brien had a long-reaching impact on Irish culture, especially for women. Photo: Getty
Back in the old country, meanwhile, the establishment sees only a wanton hedonism that it deems on-brand given the lurid content of her novels.
What Blue Road makes abundantly clear, however, is that a furious discipline underscored everything about O’Brien the author, so that she was putting out almost a novel a year during that Swinging Sixties period and beyond.
A major hiatus would come, though, in the wake of an affair with a prominent British politician who remains nameless, the relationship sending her into a deeply unhappy stupor that had severe effects on productivity, personal finances and health.
Regal of tone and painstaking in her choice of words, O’Brien makes for a defiant, wistful, often sanguine, but ultimately brittle interviewee. Most of the interviews take place on a couch in the Chelsea flat she rented in later years until a dip in health forces a break in filming.
Momentary pauses to gather her thoughts hint at the lingering pain of that early rejection by her homeland, the character assassinations by peers, and the abusive marriage to Gebler.
One particularly telling piece of archive footage shows her visiting her parents at home with a TV crew and being frozen as if in fear as her withered father sings Danny Boy by the fireside.
The road was indeed a blue one, O’Shea’s film prompts us to consider, with O’Brien’s extraordinary, timeless creative gifts coming at the expense of any prolonged happiness or emotional consistency. But it was O’Brien’s road, nonetheless, and she paved it in her own unique way.
Four stars
