Reading the blurb of The
Country Girls, I was sure I knew what I was getting into. It would be like
Love in a Cold Climate- a fun boo about teenage girls growing up and finding
love, or heartbreak. Then the
protagonist's mother died in the first few chapters and she was removed from
the care of her drunken and abusive father and I accepted that I might be
wrong. Except I wasn't. Not entirely.
There are aspects of that in Edna O'Brien's novel, but there's also a
fair amount of darkness and angst.
As I mentioned, Caithleen Brady's mother dies the day she
finds out that she has been awarded a scholarship to a fancy nun-school. Soon she and best friend Baba are off to stay
in the strict convent, stripped of all the luxuries of home. It's all very A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, really. Anyway, the pair eventually get kicked out
and, rather than returning to their provincial home town for good, hotfoot it
to Dublin in search of independence and love.
I really enjoyed this book.
Baba and Cait are funny and relatable- even if Baba is, essentially, a
cow. Baba is rich and pretty, while Cait has to rely on
her wits to get by. Cait follows Baba
into mischief even when she'd rather be sensible- she tries to flirt by
discussing James Joyce while Baba encourages men to buy them expensive
drinks. It's a friendship pattern that I
think most women would recognise from being young. Pretty much everyone has (or had) a friend
who is a terrible influence- and terribly fun.
I also liked its darkness. Cait, for all her cleverness and sensibility,
is terribly naive. Her main love
interest through the book is the dubiously named Mr Gentleman. Naturally, he is anything but and starts
courting Cait shortly after her mother dies.
He is married and she is fourteen at the time. Rather than seeing this as a fairly textbook
case of grooming (which it certainly is) Cait falls for it hook, line and
sinker. Cait is a character who is so
desperate for the ideal love that she latches on to the first man she meets who
appears to embody it, regardless of the age difference. Mr Gentleman's obvious inappropriateness and
the fact that he is clearly taking advantage of her, removes the comedy of
Cait's naivety. She is a swooning maiden
being led into a trap laid by a predator who showers her with gifts and insists
she keep their love a secret.
I am not sure why I enjoyed this book so very much. Yes, I see flashes of my teenaged self in
both Baba and Cait but that doesn’t explain it entirely. It sounds cheap to
say, but it was nice to read something that was easy. A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was nice to read and everything but
fuck me did it take some mental effort. So
many of the books on The List seem to be just like that and so it’s nice to
find one that is simple and enjoyable without the effort of trying to remember
your Shakespeare or Greek classics that you probably never learned to begin
with. It may have a fair amount of God
in it, but thankfully a working knowledge of the Bible isn’t essential to enjoy
The Country Girls.
