36 SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by ALEXANDRA BOWMAN

BOOKS

Edna O’Brien’s

Lonely Girls

The setting of her new novel is terror-ridden

Nigeria, a world away from her native Ireland,

but the psychic territory is familiar.

BY TERRENCE RAFFERTY

T

HE NOVEL IS SHORT and

spare, and its title, Girl, sounds

abstract, even generic. The

setting of the story is un spec-

ifi ed, though it’s clear enough.

It’s Nigeria, and more or less

now, during the reign of terror

of the Islamist insurgency group Boko Haram, here

referred to simply as the Jihadis. The girl of the

title, however, does have a name, Maryam, and so

do many of the other suff ering girls and boys and

men and women whose stories are told in passing

in this mournful book—people rousted from their

homes or, like Maryam, from their schools; people

captured or set wandering in an unforgiving land-

scape. Their oppressors and even their putative

saviors in the government and the army remain

anonymous. The beleaguered and the beset-upon

are the ones who count in Girl, as always in the

stories Edna O’Brien has been telling for the past

six decades. “We were at the rim of existence and

we knew it,” Maryam says at one point, and that

scary place, where a girl is alone with herself and

a dubious future, has ever been O’Brien’s favored

territory—her unnameable home.

When she made her sensational debut as a nov-

elist, with The Country Girls (1960), O’Brien was

telling the story of girls much like herself, grow-

ing up in the beauty and superstition and stifl ing

piety of Ireland’s west country and trying to fi ght

their way to another sort of life. That novel, which