THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2019 37BOOKSThat scary
place, where
a girl is
alone with
herself and
a dubious
future, has
ever been
O’Brien’s
favored
territory.was a wee bit franker about the sexual longings of
nice Irish Catholic girls than her countrymen were
used to, was promptly banned in Ireland, as were
its two sequels—The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls
in Their Married Bliss (1964)—and, for good mea-
sure, her next three novels as well. (Years later, she
discovered that her own mother had redacted her
personal copy of The Country Girls, blacking out
offending words and phrases.) Like her contem-
porary Philip Roth, who later became a fast friend,
O’Brien wrote about the messiness of sex and the
paradoxes of cultural identity in ways that seemed
to get under people’s skin, in language so luxuriant
and intimate that you couldn’t deny the power of
the feelings being described. And like Roth, she
never quite cast off the whiff of scandal that clung
to her earliest fiction. She learned, as he did, to
wear it with a certain bemused pride.
O’Brien scandalizes by other means now. Her
two most recent novels, The Little Red Chairs (2015)
and Girl, find her taking on subjects that a writer of
her years and stature might sensibly avoid as too
grim: Serbian war crimes in The Little Red Chairs,
and now the barbarities of Boko Haram. In Girl she
even makes the daring choice to tell this terrible
tale in the protagonist’s own words—an 88-year-
old Irish woman speaking in the voice of a barely
pubescent Nigerian girl. (Maryam isn’t quite sure
how old she is.)
That choice feels natural because, despite the
obvious contrasts in circumstances, this girl isn’t
so different from O’Brien’s young Irish heroines.
She lives in a world that’s testing her, daring her
to survive. And she survives, in part, by the act of
writing about her ordeals. In a scrupulously hid-
den diary, she enters the stark details of what she
endures, records the nightmares she has while
sleeping and awake. “From dream to waking and
back again,” she writes. “I cannot tell the differ-
ence.” Her matter- of-factness is heartbreaking,
as she describes a brutal kidnapping, genital
mutila tion, repeated rapes, a forced marriage, a
painful childbirth, a terrified flight through the
forest, the puzzling remoteness of family and
friends and officials, the anguish of believing
that her baby is dead—and, ever present, chaos,
hunger, fear, and self-doubt. The story her furtive
diary entries tell has a stunned, muted tone, the
flat affect of someone in shock.
This is Maryam’s voice, in Girl’s first sentences:
“I was a girl once, but not any more. I smell. Blood
dried and crusted all over me, and my wrapper
in shreds. My insides, a morass. Hurtled through
this forest that I saw, that first awful night, when
I and my friends were snatched from the school.”
It’s the deadened, illusionless voice of innocence
abruptly lost, quickened here and there by little
verbal sparks like morass and hurtled, signal flares
of the soul. O’Brien has often written about women
who are victims, but her women, even the very
young ones like Maryam, are never only victims.
They’re always fighting, often with no weapon but
language, to keep hold of themselves and find a
way home.
Girl isn’t the book to read for the history of
Boko Haram and its long assault on the peaceful
citizens of Nigeria, or for a nuanced analysis of
the country’s volatile politics. Scott MacEachern’s
Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in
Central Africa (2018) does those jobs admirably,
and The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings
and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (2016), by the
Nigeri an novelist Helon Habila, supplies more de-
tail about the 2014 schoolgirl abductions on which
O’Brien’s novel is loosely based. Girl is the book to
read for the sights and sounds and, yes, smells of
some Nigeri ans’ harrowing experiences, and for
a general sense of what it’s like to live in a world
of radical, deadly unpredictability. Everything in
Girl seems to happen suddenly, out of the blue or
in the darkness of deep night. The novel hurtles,
as its heroine is hurtled, from one thing to another
and another and another, with deranging, near-
hallucinatory speed.
The random-seeming quality of the storytelling
is something new for O’Brien, whose usual pace
is more measured and contemplative. The effect
is disorienting, and it’s meant to be. I can’t think
of another writer who so late in her career has so
thoroughly reimagined herself and the practice of
her art. She appears to have decided that the only
way to do justice to her subject is this helter- skelter
narrative style, in which events have no apparent
logic, dreams and reality interpenetrate, and other
voices, telling different stories or reciting learned
myths and legends, keep bobbing up in the choppy
course of Maryam’s tale.
We hear, in his own words, how a little boy
named John-John was captured by the Jihadis; in
her own words, how a schoolmate of Maryam’s
made her escape; how an “oldish” man named
Daran found his way to a crowded refugee camp;
how the grandfather of a pilgrim called Esau slew
a bull; and many other snatches of story, song, and
even scripture, all recorded by the wandering girl
Maryam as they were told to her. The rhythm of
Girl is intermittent and fearsomely strong; reading
this novel is like riding the rapids.
And that, it seems to me, is what living in one of
the world’s too-numerous war-ravaged places must
be like. The violence is awful, but just as awful, in a
way, is the day-to-day accommodation to relentless
illogic and unreason—the creeping sense, at every
moment, of certain disruption and displacement,
sudden exile and loss. Girl captures that sort of exis-
tential dread as well as any war novel I know. Early
on, Maryam describes the day of her kidnapping:
“We enter dense jungle, trees of all kinds, meshedGIRL
EDNA O’BRIEN
FSG