Wild Decembers

Rating:
Summary: In the footsteps of Joyce...
Review: Edna O'Brien, who grew up in Ireland and lives in London, has won high praise for many of her previous books, including a biography of James Joyce. This most recent work is sure to continue the string of critical recognition for this woman who has been called the greatest living Irish writer and hailed by Philip Roth as perhaps "the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English."

Wild Decembers, which reads at times more like poetry than prose, is a moving story about two men-Joseph Brennan & Mick Bugler-and a woman, Joseph's sister Breege. Mick Bugler arrives from a sheep farm in Australia to claim his inheritance; a farm at the top of the mountain inhabited by Joseph, Breege and the memory of their ancestors. What ensues is a neighborly friendship that turns to mistrust, then to a classic tale of warfare of close rivalries and betrayals. Along the way, O'Brien introduces us to several unforgettable characters including a pair of sisters who comically whore their way into acquiring property and sustenance in a method reminiscent of the spider who sets his trap for the unsuspecting.

Ultimately and almost predictably, the story turns tragic and we are once again reminded of the bonds to land and history that have shaped the Irish landscape and eventually mean "more than life and more than death too." Add this novel to your summer reading list.

Rating:
Summary: Uninspired
Review: I approached this book with great anticipation after reading a glowing review. I found I had a hard time sustaining interest in the book. I did not find the characters to be well drawn. Ms. O'Brien seemed to be so in love with her prose that I had difficulty understanding the motivation for her characters behavior. This seemed more an exercise in the writing of prose than in the crafting of a novel.

Rating:
Summary: ONE OF THE FINEST
Review: I heard a fascinating interview with the author on NPR and immediately went online to buy this novel. What a wonderful read! This is a passionate tale about love and duty, honor and sex, fidelity and family. Every single character (& there are dozens) is drawn fully and deeply, even those characters who appear only for a few pages. The story is a simple one with its routes in "Romeo and Juliet:" two families forever at war even after they've forgotten why they are feuding. It is also a story of a small town in Ireland and every single one of its inhabitants and how they effect the three principal characters: Joseph, a farmer, and his sister Breege who falls in love with Mick Bugler, a stranger from Australia, and how their love for one another changes everyone's life. You cannot help but know that the story will end tragically, but because you care for each of the principal chararacters so much and because Edna O'Brien refuses to label some good and others bad, you keep hoping for the inevitable to be put off. O'Brien is obviously influenced by James Joyce: her language is at all times ripe and imaginative and wonderfully descriptive. Her prose also reminds me of William Faulkner and the way he had of burrowing deep into the minds and souls of his complex people. This is certainly one of the finest contemporary novels I have read in many years.

Rating:
Summary: On pride and vanity
Review: I read this book, my first contact with O'Brien, its author, after hearing a glowing review on NPR. It is full of poetic, ominously foreboding, beautifully descriptive invocations of the mountain where the action is set, at Cloontha in the West of Ireland. The protagonists are the young sister and brother, Brige and Joseph Brennan, who have lived together since their childhood when they were early orphaned and Mick Bugler, who has just returned from Australia to claim his inheritance of the land on the mountain adjacent to Joe and Brige's dairy. What follows is the inevitably tragic denoument following a Romeo and Juliet attraction between the young woman and the "Shepherd", Bugler. The struggle over old land feuds recalls today's news from former Yugoslavia, from the Middle East and yes, from Ireland. By the time I reached the inevitable tragedy at the end I could hardly breathe. The supporting characters are wonderfully drawn. This is the best new book I've read.

Rating:
Summary: THE NOT SO "WILD" DECEMBERS
Review: I usually love to read about books set in Ireland where the countryside is always greener than green and the dampness wetter than wet. So it was this love that inspired me to read my first Edna O'Brien novel. Set in Western Ireland in the small town of Cloontha, the story follows the quest for land and the acknowledgement of who is the rightful owner. This is an age old problem passed down through generations and, as O'Brien writes, "fields mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too." But she also writes that "the enemy came in the night but the enemy can come at any hour....because the enemy is ALWAYS THERE."

This is how the story begins with the arrival of the enemy -- a brick red tractor that has shown up on the fields, stuck as it was in the mud, with a driver aboard -- one Michael Bugler, noted to be a fine speciman of a man. Is it the tractor who is the enemy or the passenger? Bugler has come to claim land that he has recently inherited. There is one problem though -- part of this land is on what Joseph Brennan considers to be "his mountain". The second problem is that Joseph Brennan has a beautiful sister named Breege who has become giddy over the arrival of the new tractor and its driver. O'Brien writes that "the tractor was music to her ears and a gall to her brother's."

What follows is a fight for land, a fight for love and a struggle to keep one's sanity when all else around you has gone haywire.

Edna O'Brien writes a story laced with impending doom. You know something will happen....you just don't know how bad it will be. As she tells us, "one mad minute stretches into a lifetime." That quote is so true because you can be a model citizen for 364 days of the year and do something bad on that 365th day and the goodness is forgotten and all that remains is that one bad day.

As much as I like stories set in Ireland, this one dragged for me. I felt no kinship to the characters and, while I understood their motivations, I felt no empathy toward them. Yes, "the warring sons of warring sons are sent to repossess ground gone forever" and I'm sure love triangles and tragedy are part of the scenario. I just didn't walk away from this reading experience with any sense of satisfaction in having read this book. This is just my humble opinion and I have rated this book solely based on my enjoyment factor...certainly no indication of the author's ability as a writer.

Rating:
Summary: Another sad song of Ireland.
Review: If you've never read an Irish novel, you'll love this book for its ability to distill the essence of the land and its people. If you love opera, melodrama, or soap opera, you'll love it for the passionate intensity of the characters. If you love language and poetry, you'll love it for its rich trove of vivid images. But if you are looking for a new vision of life in the Irish countryside, a set of characters different from the typical, devoutly family-oriented, self-sacrificing farm family, and a poetic style which is not described in terms of Joyce, Hopkins, Thomas, or Yeats, you may be a bit disappointed. It's a very enjoyable book, and it's full of passion, but it's not unique.

When Mick Bugler arrives in the small town of his ancestors to claim his inheritance, his nearest neighbors are Joseph Brennan and his sister Breege. An expansive Australian with an insensitivity to his neighbor's deeply felt commitments to his farm, Mick invites the enmity which develops when he opportunistically pre-empts the fields Joe has rented over a long period of time and challenges him regarding ownership of land. The resentments come to a head when Joe senses and moves to prevent a relationship between Mick and Breege. Joe's history of mental instability, the arrival of Mick's possessive and almost equally unstable fiance, a jealous and meddlesome Crock, and a breakdown by Breege further guarantee a tragic ending.

Unlike a true tragedy, however, there is little recognition by Joe, Breege, or the townspeople here that they have any responsibility for or control over the ultimate outcome. No one really changes. At the end of the book, all are still as irrationally motivated as they were at the beginning. None have taken charge of their lives, and there is no sense that anyone has learned anything significant. I think O'Brien could have used her setting and characters to more noble effect--raising this sad story to real significance, rather than just dramatic effect. She achieves such significance in Down By the River and House of Splendid Isolation.

Rating:
Summary: Another sad song of Ireland.
Review: If you've never read an Irish novel, you'll love this book for its ability to distill the essence of the land and its people. If you love opera, melodrama, or soap opera, you'll love it for the passionate intensity of the characters. If you love language and poetry, you'll love it for its rich trove of vivid images. But if you are looking for a new vision of life in the Irish countryside, a set of characters different from the typical, devoutly family-oriented, self-sacrificing farm family, and a poetic style which is not described in terms of Joyce, Hopkins, Thomas, or Yeats, you may be a bit disappointed. It's a very enjoyable book, and it's full of passion, but it's not unique.

When Mick Bugler arrives in the small town of his ancestors to claim his inheritance, his nearest neighbors are Joseph Brennan and his sister Breege. An expansive Australian with an insensitivity to his neighbor's deeply felt commitments to his farm, Mick invites the enmity which develops when he opportunistically pre-empts the fields Joe has rented over a long period of time and challenges him regarding ownership of land. The resentments come to a head when Joe senses and moves to prevent a relationship between Mick and Breege. Joe's history of mental instability, the arrival of Mick's possessive and almost equally unstable fiance, a jealous and meddlesome Crock, and a breakdown by Breege further guarantee a tragic ending.

Unlike a true tragedy, however, there is little recognition by Joe, Breege, or the townspeople here that they have any responsibility for or control over the ultimate outcome. No one really changes. At the end of the book, all are still as irrationally motivated as they were at the beginning. None have taken charge of their lives, and there is no sense that anyone has learned anything significant. I think O'Brien could have used her setting and characters to more noble effect--raising this sad story to real significance, rather than just dramatic effect. She achieves such significance in Down By the River and House of Splendid Isolation.

Rating:
Summary: A classic work of fiction
Review: Joseph Brennan and his sister Breege have always lived in Cloontha, Ireland just like generations of Brennans before them. Joseph remains a bachelor because no woman can compete with his love for the land. Their close relationship changes when the Brennan siblings meet Australian Mick Bugler, who has recently inherited a nearby farm from a deceased relative.

Joseph and Mick initially get along quite well until the ancestral dispute between their families over land drives a wedge between them. However, Breege is attracted to the handsome newcomer who admits he has a fiancee waiting for him Down Under. As she falls in love with the Australian, she tries to reconcile the differences between Mick and her beloved brother, who will do anything to keep his innocent sister from being hurt by the "Despoiler."

WILD DECEMEBR is an excellent character-driven piece that will thrill fans of relationship dramas. The splendid story line is entertaining, as Ireland becomes vividly alive through the writer's pen. The three prime protagonists are fully developed so the audience understands their motives even as Edna O'Brien keeps her plot consistent to their individualism and their interrelationships. Readers who enjoy an Irish relationship drama will gain immense pleasure from Ms. O'Brien's novel.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, passionate, brilliantly written
Review: The remote fields and mountains of Western Ireland in Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel may be hauntingly beautiful, but they're haunted as well.

Overlaid with a grid of legal claims and counter-claims, this land has been sown with centuries of resentment and violence as rival families have fought each other with lawsuits and gunshots "in the name of honour [sic] and land and kindred and blood." Even the tiniest piece of land can be the bone of contention sticking in someone's throat. "Wild Decembers" brilliantly and poetically captures the brooding power of this murky past as it poisons the lives of three young farmers: Joe Brennan, his sister Breege, and the man who changes both their lives forever, Mick Bugler.

Mick has returned to Ireland from sheep farming in Australia to restore inherited land for himself and his fiancee. But every step he takes embroils him in legal disputes with Joe over access to parcels of land he claims are his but Joe says were long since deeded away to the Brennans. Their families have been at odds for generations, and that quicksand of hatred inexorably draws both of them under, first erupting in a bar room brawl, even while they sometimes try to be civil with each other.

Violence broods over every page, even the most beautiful or comical (the book is filled with eccentrics). And all of it takes place as if on stage, since the entire populace of the nearby town is studying their entanglement and wondering how dreamy, suppressed Breege feels about the both of them.

Joe and Mick's enmity nearly destroys Breege's mind as she's torn between family loyalty and a burgeoning wild love for Mick that brings her fully to life for the first time. O'Brien's evocation of her longing, excitement and shame is at times almost breathtakingly intense and beautiful. And overall, there's hardly a page where you won't want to read a passage aloud to marvel over. O'Brien's skillful mix of letters and shifting viewpoints makes the story all the more intimate and dramatic as we enter the dark corners of three stifled lives on the point of exploding.

The prose is virile, sinuous, startling, immediate--whirling you up into the sky with birds, across a field with a terrified rabbit,and down tumbling streams. And through O'Brien's magic, the stifled hopes of the book's three main characters flare up so intensely you feel singed by their passion and stunned by their reversals. "Wild Decembers" is a gorgeously written and heartbreaking novel, one of the most powerful I've read in years.

Rating:
Summary: Been There, Read That
Review: They say that all love stories are tragedies, and that's certainly true of this story of two men feuding over land and a woman. Set in a small village in western Ireland, the tale tackles the flaws in human nature: jealousy, envy, pride, madness, etc-without saying anything new or interesting. O'Brien sets everything up early: the reader is told this is a place where men have fought over land for centuries, and is introduced to the bachelor farmer Joseph, his pretty younger sister Breen, and their new wealthier neighbor Mick. Within the first ten pages it's pretty clear where everything is going to lead, and it grows wearisome plowing through the florid prose and many diversions to arrive at the heavily foreshadowed dark conclusion.

All the characters drift reflexively through the motions assigned to them, apparently locked into their vicious circles. None of the three main protagonists are particularly compelling or engaging, indeed the best that can be said is that one feels a deep for Breen, who is stuck in her situation. The setting itself is a kind of unreal "village-that-time-forgot" creation, where a new tractor is a big thing, the local gossip knows all, and two saucy sisters act as succubi. Ultimately, everyone in the book is a type, there are numbingly obvious metaphors (for example, Mick's cutting into a peat bed Joseph claims ownership of is symbolic of the rape Jospeh fears Mick will visit on Breen), and there's nothing here that Shakespeare and others haven't already done better.