Book Review : A Moody Novel Provides a Too-Grand Operatic Finale

The High Road by Edna O’Brien (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $18.95; 188 pages)

Middle age has not only dampened but drenched the high spirits of the country girls who frolicked through Edna O’Brien’s earlier novels. Anna, the narrator of “The High Road,” is an embittered woman who has gone to an unnamed Spanish island to recover from a soured love affair. There, far from the fog and gloom of her native heath, she hopes to recover her equanimity, though the adventure begins inauspiciously when the villa she’s rented turns out to be menaced by rats and an in-house prowler.

After one miserable night there, she decides to go home, but is dissuaded by a fellow countryman named David Anthony Ignatius Donne, known by choice as D’Arcy. A painter, a historian, a drunk and a leech, D’Arcy nevertheless persuades her to give the place a chance. Spouting pretentious pseudo-Joycean nonsense, he introduces her to Wanda, another member of the expatriate colony, and the only one who seems reasonably stable.

With Wanda’s help, Anna settles into a house already inhabited by Charlotte, a mysterious and all but invisible Englishwoman also in flight from her past. So far, the foreign colony doesn’t seem to promise much in the way of diversion, and matters hardly improve with the introduction of Iris, a glamorous eccentric driven to the edge of madness by a terrible secret of her own.

Gorgeous Landscape

Though the opening pages are a showcase for O’Brien’s descriptive powers, the gorgeous landscape only serves to emphasize Anna’s depression. Even when she is rhapsodizing about the mountains, the sea and the dazzling profusion of birds, trees, and flowers, she can’t help brooding about her personal disaster, the curdled romance that dribbled on to “an end that consumed by middle years like a terrible wasting sickness,” leading to inevitable thoughts of suicide.

Though Anna hasn’t been on the island nearly long enough to have her prose style affected by D’Arcy’s extravagant imagery, by her second night she’s already thinking of the sea as “a great, dark, recumbent wet mother; mother of creatures, animate and half animate, mother of life and earth, moon and star, mother of the unknown; indifferent to the wretched pleas or cries of man.”

The mood lifts slightly when Anna moves into the local hotel and encounters Catalina, a vivacious and spirited village girl who works there as chambermaid. Within an improbably short time, the aging Irishwoman and the young Spanish girl become close friends, a relationship made even sweeter by the differences between them.

Beautiful and Earthy

Remarkably worldly for someone who grew up in so isolated a place, Catalina responds to Anna’s tentative overtures with enthusiasm. Beautiful, earthy, and as sensitive as Anna to the beauties of the environment, Catalina seems cast as Anna’s savior. Revitalized by this vibrant and charming creature, Anna seems destined to recover her joie de vivre and return to England a new woman.

Various omens, scattered throughout the novel like gristle in paella, suggest that this may not turn out to be the case, though even these portents can’t quite prepare the reader for the Grand Guignol ending egregiously grafted upon a story far too slight to support the operatic finale.

While O’Brien’s literary virtues--erudition, antic wit, an occasional and welcome bawdiness--all show up in “The High Road,” these charms are overmatched by murky symbolism, characters who slide into caricature, a plot that taxes the credulity at every turn, and a self-pitying narrator who never engages our sympathy.