I really wanted to love this book more than I did. I knew this book had been controversial/banned when it first came out in 1965 so I was expecting a steamy novel, but this was quite bleak and difficult to read at times.
The main premise is that we have Ellen, a young separated Irish woman who is struggling with how to spend her time now that her young son and her husband are on a camping holiday in Wales. She’s stuck in a hot London, lonely and seething. What lover or distraction can be found to soothe her aching soul?
I really enjoyed getting into her head and finding out more about her feelings: you build a lot of rapport with Ellen. Her reflections on her Irish catholic childhood and how it maps onto the way that she feels about herself, her sexuality, and motherhood are really interesting.
There are some really powerful and devastating observations about family dynamics. The novel feels very truthful, albeit bleak.
Ellen eventually finds herself heading off to the south of France on a spontaneous adventure: she goes through a series of incidents involving men and her sexuality, but also partying and the general Riviera lifestyle.
Without giving too much away, there is a bit of a twist or a turn midway through, and we get a really interesting insight into trauma and grief.
I’m interested in Edna O’Brien as a writer and I want to read her more recent work as well as her famous The Country Girls trilogy. I think her exploration of Catholicism and identity is fascinating and I like her prose style.
The fact that this book has been mythologised disrupts what it actually is. Despite its name and its cover, this is not a sultry summer novel, but a more dense and challenging novel about being a woman and a mother. In fact, it has a lot of echoes of narratives that have become popularised over the last few years: women as complex cynical adventurers who go against the “Madonna mother” grain.
One word: desolate.
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