- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (Mar 1 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0618197303
- ISBN-13: 978-0618197309
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 14.8 x 2.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 454 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,365,812 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
In the best of Edna O'Brien's novels, there is a lawless element, a violence, that springs up to satisfy some primal urge: revenge, desire, thwarted love, or even the seemingly contrasting need of a community for balance and order. In the Forest is based on a true story of a local terror, a murderer sprung from the fertile soil of the west Ireland countryside. Michen O'Kane is a loving boy gone bad. His father beat his mother, and his mother died young, leaving 10-year-old Michen to the indifferent care of relatives and teachers. A rich fantasy life and little outside guidance quickly lead to a detention center, where Michen is the prey of bullies, as well as of a kindly priest with an unfortunate use for small boys. But none of these factors fully explains Michen's transformation into a killer. It is one of the strengths of this difficult and beautifully written novel that the lyrical fragments of Michen's tale--told from various points of view--do not completely add up. The dark mysteries of psychosis are left intact. We have only evocative glimpses of Michen's inner world and a crystal-clear image of the ruin he left behind. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
Based on a real triple homicide that shocked Ireland in 1994, O'Brien's short, stark and eloquent novel reveals an unforgettable prospect of hell. This hell is contained in the feverishly disturbed mind of Michen O'Kane (perhaps a wordplay on Cain), the murderer. From an early age, O'Kane displays spontaneous unsociability, for which he is punished with unremitting cruelty, first by his wife-beating father, then by the villagers of Cloosh, his small Irish village, and then by the Irish juvenile detention system, where he is sodomized and psychologically tortured. O'Kane comes back to Cloosh a ticking bomb, hearing voices in his head. After he sets up a camp in the woods, he sets his sights on a relative stranger in the village, a free spirit named Eily Ryan who, with her son, Maddie, is living a modern, single mother's lifestyle obscurely disapproved of by the conservative villagers. One morning O'Kane kidnaps her and the boy. She's forced to drive O'Kane to his woods, passing through the village in full view of several frightened bystanders, who do nothing to help her. After murdering his two victims, O'Kane kidnaps a priest and repeats the act. Like Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, this story is about acts of naked violence that put to an extreme test the proposition that nothing human is alien to us. O'Brien's brilliant stroke is to make us understand that O'Kane is not merely a savage madman, by placing him in the milieu that formed his character. Incapable of overcoming childhood patterns of violence, O'Kane, in a horribly distorted way, becomes our mirror image; he's both "the personification of evil" and our "own flesh and blood, gone amok." O'Brien's sentient, sonorous prose makes both O'Kane's inner world and his environment nearly palpable. 4-city author tour.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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First Sentence
Woodland straddling two counties and several town-lands, a drowsy corpus of green, broken only where the odd pine has struck up on its own, spindly, freakish, the stray twigs on either side branched, cruciform wise. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Woodland straddling two counties and several town-lands, a drowsy corpus of green, broken only where the odd pine has struck up on its own, spindly, freakish, the stray twigs on either side branched, cruciform wise. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
O'Brien Misses The Mark,
By Totally Anonymous (Private) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In the Forest: A Novel (Paperback)
I had a hard time making up my mind about Edna O'Brien's latest novel, IN THE FOREST. There's no doubt that O'Brien is a masterful writer...just read THE COUNTRY GIRLS TRILOGY or WILD DECEMBERS and you'll see just how good she can be. Maybe O'Brien simply raised the bar so high herself and that's why I thought IN THE FOREST just didn't live up to her previous writing.I think IN THE FOREST missed the mark in part because it's so predictable and in part because of the lack of complex characterization. O'Brien's Eily Ryan is too good, too innocent, too naive. And, just as Eily is too good, Michen O'Kane is too damaged. We understand why he does the things he does, but his psyche is such that he doesn't have to struggle with his bad deeds; he's too emotionally shattered to understand their full impact. I also didn't think O'Brien's prose, especially her distinctly Irish voice, lived up to her past work. This isn't to say the narrative or the dialogue is bad. When compared with 99% of the stuff on the bestseller lists these days, the narrative that comprises IN THE FOREST is superlative, but it's not superlative when judged against Edna O'Brien's previous work. And, I also found evidence of more than a little sloppiness in the narrative of this book. For example, O'Brien writes: "a lying, untruthful, cunning, self-interested liar." That made me sad; I have come to expect a lot more from Edna O'Brien. I realize O'Brien was dealing with factual material here, but I think IN THE FOREST could have been improved had O'Brien fictionalized her account a little more and made Eily a little more "bad" and Michen a little less damaged. I liked the claustrophobic feel of IN THE FOREST but I didn't like the fact that it was so predictable. We know Eily is going to be murdered (even if you aren't familiar with the facts of this case, O'Brien tells us on page two) and we know that Michen is psychically damaged beyond redemption. I found the book mildly interesting, but I really had no emotional investment in it. I would recommend IN THE FOREST only to die hard fans of Edna O'Brien who want to keep up on all her writing.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Don't read it alone in bed on a stormy night,
By
This review is from: In the Forest: A Novel (Paperback)
Into the Forest is a disturbing look into the tortured soul of a man haunted by his past. He, is drawn into deeper evils that suck him ever deeper and deeper, not releasing him - or we readers - till the very last page. Based on a true-life triple homicide in Ireland in 1994, O'Brien's tale takes us into the hunted and haunted mind of O'Kane, the murderer. This story deals with acts of naked violence and is not for the faint of heart. No sunny conclusion, either.
2.0 out of 5 stars
In the Forest,
By Matt Hausfater (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In the Forest: A Novel (Hardcover)
"In the Forest," is a novel written by Edna O'Brien in which she takes us through the twisted mind of a psychotic criminal,describing everything and leaving nothing to the imagination. The story has no protagonist to suppress or defend the intrinsic evil of Michen O'Kane, therefore leaving nearly three hundred pages to indulge in the disturbing and misguided crimes he so selflessly committs. However, this is not where the book fails in its attempt to expose the prejudices of society's outlook on the insane. A lack of connection to O'Kane or any other character for that matter, creates a feeling of isolation from truly understanding O'Kane's motives or convictions at any given time. The story tends to drag on, lacking in substance while O'Kane grows more evil with every turn of a page, transforming into an unrecognizanle form of a human being. The greatest failure lies in the pitiful attempt to include a love theme with O'Kane's proclaimed love a stranger named Eily. The plot is tedious and predictably cut short when O'Kane rapes and murders Eily and then murders her child. Referring back to O'Kane losing his mother which he explains at the end of the novel is the reason why he kills the son, to prevent him from living the life he himself has. This is the only part of the book to be grateful for because it prevents the possibility for a sequel.
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