Meredith Taylor on Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien story

Meredith Taylor

Dir/Wri: Sinead O’Shea | With: Edna O’Brien, Jessie Buckley (narrator), Declan Conlon, Gabriel Byrne, Anne Enright, Garlo Gebler, Sasha Gebler | Ireland, Biopic 108′

“Maimed and stark and misshapen but ferociously tenacious” is a phrase that Edna O’Brien dreamt up to express the Irish. Ironically, it also captures her own turbulent life as a woman struggling to find her place in a man-dominated domain. Successful through her dogged determination she would go on to publish thirty-four books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry before her death in July 2024.

Ferocious, feminist yet consistently brave and daring, O’Brien forged a florid path in female literature during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s eventually making it in the London literary circuit and buying a large house in Chelsea with her earnings. No mean feat, even today.

Intensely researched and gracefully put together by writer director Sinead O’Shea this intimate film blends original footage, personal photos with poetic imagery to capture the essence of this expressionist but often misunderstood writer whose love of nature and the countryside around County Clare would be her guiding inspiration and muse.

Narrated by Jessie Buckley the film includes the film’s plentiful archival interviews with O’Brien who comes across as spirited, vulnerable but always assertive: a force to be reckoned whose powers of description are lush, articulate and thoughtful despite her often-abrasive delivery.

Like so many artists, writing allowed her an escape from reality: an oppressive upbringing in the fiercely Catholic Ireland on the day; a dominant, hard-drinking father who had gambled away his family’s fortune; and a subservient mother who cowed in the background, doing his bidding. Edna was their final child, not wanted, but deeply loved by her mother, then in her late 40s, after an initial rejection. O’Brien conjures up a dreadful early year and teenage hood where young girls feared the Catholic Church and accepted, unconditionally, their role as secondary to men. Harsh he may have been, but O’Brien reflects back on her father as a powerful influence in some of the film’s most poignant scenes.

First love came with a sophisticated local figure, a communist, she met in Dublin in the early 1950s where she was employed as a columnist in a weekly magazine. Ernest Gebler, divorced and dominating, like her father, would soon become her husband – against her parents’ wishes. Of Czech he would father to her two children: Carlo and Sasha and become deeply jealous of her writing. Well-known Irish actor Gabriel Byrne describes how the literary scene at the time was male-orientated and women were not welcome. Nonetheless, it was James Joyce who inspired O’Brien’s own fiction, which – needless to say – pictured men in a negative light.

The County Girls was O’Brien’s first novel. Its publication in 1960 sent Gebler into a vehement rage. Her career quickly took off, diminishing her husband who felt snubbed at his own career being eclipsed by a woman, not least his wife. In an act of defiance, he began to annotate her diaries in red ink with negative comments about her work and family, demanding any cheques she received to be paid into his own bank account.

O’Brien struggled against the odds: her failing marriage, condemnation from the Catholic Church and even the Irish government who claimed that The Country Girls was ‘filth’. The book, the first of a trilogy, was banned in Ireland. Undeterred she carried on potentially alienating male readers with novels that pictured women as independent, freedom-seekers whose only need for men came from “the pleasure they give us in bed”. But her work continued to explore the emotional relationship between men and women despite her own troubled love life.

But amongst her fellow writers and creative spirits she was celebrated – although none appear in the film’s archive interviews. O’Brien became the talk of the town in London’s swinging sixties and saucy seventies when she partied with the Chelsea set and even slept with Hollywood stars such as Robert Mitchum and Richard Burton, although Marlon Brando purportedly turned her down, and drank a glass of milk. During this time, she was offered film work in the shape of Zee and Co. a raunchy drama starring Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine and Susannah York, enabling her to acquire the Chelsea pad where the great and the good, such as Princess Margaret, were entertained. O’Brien in a later interview shortly before her death, admits to not having been impressed by the limelight, preferring the country life and communing with cows as her most cherished experiences.

The film turns to darker territory as O’Brien underwent psychotherapy with R.D. Laing and experimented with drugs and an affair with a British politician – these scenes are particularly depressing and bring out the deep soulfulness of her character forcing her into introspective suicidal thoughts and overspending while she desperately tried to dredge another novel from the depths of her misery.

At upturn in her finances came with a change of direction. The late 1980s saw her embarking on a teaching career in New York’s . Clearly talented O’Brien inspired as slew of new and successful writers, one of whom Walter Mosley, discusses 1990 novel Devil in a Blue Dress, a Neo-noir mystery that would provide the source material for an made an award-winning film starring Denzil Washington. The break provided space to continue her writing. The Little Red Chairs, her final novel, focuses on a fictional Balkan war criminal and his impact on the women of an Irish village.

With its fascinating insights and imaginative camerawork Blue Road, takes its title from the visual impression of rain-soaked lanes in O’Brien’s beloved Ireland, and O’Shea and her editor Gretta Ohle create a vivid tribute to one of Ireland’s greatest novelists. Clearly the relationship with her strong-willed father drove her to strive for success. But at the end all she remembers, tellingly, is the vulnerable child in him before his own death. “It gets lonely sometimes, Edna” will strike a chord with many of us.

@MeredithTaylor

BLUE ROAD: THE EDNA O’BRIEN STORY comes to cinemas on 18 April courtesy of Modern Films