Night by Edna O’Brien
Mary Hooligan lies in bed, recollecting in a high modernist stream of consciousness the various incidents of her life. Most of those incidents are sexcapades of some sort, but there is also her family, her home town, her musings on her final resting place. Growing up in Coose, in rural Ireland, she flees to England after being caught in the act with a “jackeen”, that is to say some city boy, after the fancy dress parade on St Peter and St Paul’s day. Hooligan’s proclivities mean that Ireland might not be the best place for her. She crosses the sea to England where her various liaisons see her engaging with the full range of society, from a Duke who wants to make an honest woman of her, to a penniless waiter who ruins his chances with his moaning. She has lived a rich life, if you are to judge by the breadth of her romances, even if not the depth. “I can’t cavil. I’ve had my share, even a lumberman from Scandia with a very radical thrust. A motley crew, all shades, dimensions, breeds, ilks, national characteristics, inflammatingness, and penetratingness.”
It is Hooligan’s bracing openness to all manner of encounters, and her particular way of words that give her story its charm."…I even had a bit of a yen for a Black Mass, which as I understood it, entailed semen in the belly, a great gout of demon’s shampoo." she muses when the Duke propositions her for something a little beyond the ordinary. It is not merely stream of consciousness we are getting here, but O’Brien’s full creative drive to play with language. But the reader will do well to keep up. Hooligan is not much concerned with the usual business of table-setting or introducing the guests as they arrive. Reviewers have been ready to compare Hooligan to Joyce’s Molly Bloom, and it is hard not to imagine that O’Brien had her in mind, and wrote hoping to claim her place in that tradition. You don’t write a novel like this by accident.
The back of my copy describes Mary Hooligan as “memorably unhinged”, “compelling”, and “garrulous”. I find the idea of Mary as memorable interesting. In fact I think the contradiction about both people and characters like Mary is that however striking their arrival in other people’s lives, they are a gone soon after. For many of the men she encountered, I suspect the memory of her would be as slippery as Mary’s own recollections. There are those who she has a more lasting bond with: an unsympathetic ex-husband, a solitary father, a son who we learn of mostly through his mail. But these relationships put Mary in a bind. They are shadows of a more perfect love that has eluded her. After declaring her desire to be buried alone, early in the novel she asks, “Do I mean it? Apparently not.”