The Light of Evening [Paperback]

In this poetic story of mothers and daughters and grandmothers, memory and remembrance perpetually shroud and encapsulate the present. As the novel begins, Dilly, a woman of advancing age is told that she must go to Dublin for observation.

Dilly lies in a hospital bed and begins to see her life pass before her in rapid succession, "like clouds - different shapes and different colours, merging and passing one another." As her life is steadily pulled out of her, like pages pulled from a book, she falls into fitful dreams where her chequered past gradually emerges.

Determined to make a new life for herself, away from her domineering mother and the "troubles" of Ireland, Dilly travels to New York to start a new life. After a hellish sea voyage, Dilly is forced to go through Ellis Island where she and the other immigrants are subjected to every kind of humiliation, herded into different groups, names and numbers tagged into chests, the inspectors like hawks, looking for every sickness.

Now in America, a world that seems both strange and carnival-like, "a land of bluff and blighted dreams," Tilly's cousin provides her with a room in a boarding house and employment as a domestic servant in the home of a Mr. and Mrs. McCormack, a bourgeois couple who advocate "nothing but rules."

It is here in this life existing of "crush-proof blouses and coatees and capes stoles and muffs," that Tilly finds her only real friend in fellow maid Solveig and has a love affair with a young man that ends in disaster. Finding New York a place of intense pressure, here "people are always moving on so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could," Tilly's efforts to breakaway from her family are not that successful and she eventually returns to her roots in Ireland where she marries and has a family.

Whilst the bells inside Dilly's head, chime half a century apart, bringing her gradually awake, her mind constantly clogged with "memories and with muddle." The crux of her thinking is always with her family and her children, as she disentangles the hurts they have caused her. Her son Terence has fallen under the influence of a grasping wife and has become as avaricious as she, and her daughter Eleanor has always had her head constantly stuck in the clouds.

Now a talented author, Eleanor earns the distain of Dilly for marrying Hermann, a domineering older man whom Dilly is convinced that her daughter did not love. Eleanor actually confesses that she had eloped in a trance, in haste, her docility a mask.

Even Hermann would always contend that Eleanor had married him under the guise of love, to better her ambitions. By choosing this madman for a husband, Dilly contends that her daughter has driven a last nail in her mother's coffin, the gulf between mother and daughter finally becoming insurmountable.

The novel is a poetic homage to what is left unsaid, where a mother and a daughter have held each other at a distance for so long. Eleanor in particular, is unable to confide, for the very simple reason that she fears she will break down completely if she confesses to her mother just how unhappy she is.

Whilst Dilly seems to find solace in the natural beauty of Rusheen, her family home, the place where her sorrows had multiplied and yet was also so dear to her, Eleanor throws herself headlong into a clandestine affair that does little to assuage her inconsolable grief.

Intricate, deeply compassionate and poetically resonant, The Light of Evening tells of two women held irrevocably apart by the their petty disloyalties and their familial disillusionments.

Although the novel stalls a bit towards the end, as Dilly's almost stream-of-conscious letters seem to take hold of the narrative, the wolves of memory and sorrow continue to echo throughout each generation as author Edna O'Brien continues with her soft, delicate and subtle touch. Mike Leonard October 06.

The prolific Edna O'Brien's latest novel, THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING, is --- like much of her work --- about place, loss and longing as well as identity and misunderstanding. She acknowledges James Joyce as a strong influence on her prose, and his voice is evident here; this novel is mostly stream of consciousness and deals with subjective memory, not to mention Ireland.

Dilly is dying of cancer, and as she moves toward the end of her life, her mind and heart take her to her past. She remembers her tense relationship with her mother and leaving her small Irish town for America in the 1920s. There she works as a domestic and has a quite typical immigrant experience (poetically and sensitively rendered by O'Brien). She falls in love with a dashing, romantic Irish-American only to have her dream of a life with him thwarted. Dilly returns to Ireland and marries a solid man, prone to heavy drinking, the heir of a crumbling but proud estate. She has two children, a son and a daughter. And it is the relationship between Dilly and her daughter Eleanora on which the book centers.

Dilly and Eleanora, like Dilly and her own mother, have a tense relationship. Eleanora strains under the confines of rural Ireland and longs to leave. She finally does and marries a foreign writer in London, distancing herself from her mother and her Irish roots even further. Eleanora becomes a famous writer herself and, after divorcing her husband, engages in a series of disastrous affairs. As Dilly spends her last days in a Catholic hospital tended to by nuns, she waits for Eleanora to visit. In the meantime, she tells much of her life story to a kind nun who seems convinced that Eleanora's visit will bring reconciliation and closure. But the visit proves tense, anti-climactic and sad. Eleanora flees and leaves behind a journal recording her feelings about her mother, which, of course, Dilly reads. Readers hear the voices of Dilly's mother, Dilly and Eleanora though letters, first-person memories, third-person narrative, and finally, Eleanora's raw and emotional journal.

Surrounded by the nuns, but emotionally and physically far from her family, Dilly's last days are full of longing and regret but also deep love.

Much of THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING seems autobiographical; O'Brien's mother, like Dilly, did leave Ireland in the 1920s for New York where she worked as a maid, and like Eleanora, O'Brien became a controversial writer, reviled and treasured, in her homeland.

O'Brien's novel is at once hyper-emotional and stoic. It is a lyrical and challenging exploration of place and the complicated, not always pleasant, mother/daughter bond. Dilly and Eleanora need each other but also repel each other. They consider themselves to be very different yet their desires and feelings often mirror one another. The men in the novel fall into neat stereotypes (the hero, the drinker, the Irish-American dreamer) and are usually one-dimensional. The women, however, are vivid and heartfelt characters; they are complex, flawed and real. O'Brien successfully weaves into the story the importance of folklore and Catholicism for Irish identity, and in that way further cements her hard-earned reputation as one of the most important contemporary Irish storytellers.

THE LIGHT OF THE EVENING is perhaps not quite as readable or even enjoyable as her recent IN THE FOREST. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful novel --- brave and difficult, lovely and heartbreaking. Readers have come to expect no less from O'Brien.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

This book held my interest initially when the mother, Dilly, is a young girl and travels against her parents' wishes to America. The descriptions of what life was like for a young domestic were illuminating and offered interesting food for thought on the class structure (Irish emigrees still subjugating their own countrymen). And the letters from Dilly to her daughter, Eleanora, were real and full of life. Sadly, all of the novel that centers on Eleanora and her sad life is just empty in feel--I couldn't wait to be finished reading those sections. If, metaphorically, O'Brien wishes for the reader to see Dilly as the one full of life despite her impending death, then she succeeded. Otherwise, this novel simply fails on almost all levels to be either an enjoyable read or a book with any true enlightenment about the mother/daughter relationship.