In Limbo with Love's Exiles

By Paul Gray

THE HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 214 pages; $18.95

A woman is shaken out of sleep in an unfamiliar room, roused by a noise nearby that seems to contain a threat aimed at her: "I thought I heard my name -- Anna, Anna -- being uttered with malice." But that is impossible. As she gropes toward consciousness, Anna remembers that no one in this place could know her, that she only arrived the previous evening and that, though it is still dark, the dawn will come up on Easter Sunday.

This brief scene, poised between dream and reality, introduces The High Road, Edna O'Brien's tenth novel, and contains portents of nearly everything that will follow. As Anna proceeds with her story, it becomes clear that she is a voluntary exile in a limbo between her past and future. Stingy with specific details, as if unwilling to bore herself with facts she already knows, she parcels out her history in offhand hints.

Anna is well known enough, at something, to have made a lecture tour through the U.S., talking about her native Ireland, that "battle-haunted, famine- haunted land." She is the mother of two grown sons, and has apparently been divorced from their father for some time. She has run away to an unspecified Spanish village bordering a sea, presumably the Mediterranean, to escape from a long, ultimately unhappy love affair back home in London. "I would grow to forget him," she says, or hopes, "the him that I believed had broken my heart, but in my saner moments I recognized as being probably the last to partake with me at that fount of sensuality, and vertigo and earthly love." Her awakening on Easter, instead of any other morning, seems accidental, but before her adventure is over there will be sacrifice and redemption.

Anna's subdued, almost distracted, narrative tone at first seems an unwise, self-imposed narrowing of O'Brien's characteristic voice: the earthy, word- besotted vitality that sang through her dazzling first novels of a quarter- century ago, The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss. But O'Brien is not writing about girls anymore. Those eager, headstrong creatures in the early books who dashed toward the flame of maturity have now come out on the other side, badly burned.

Anna is one such casualty, and she imagines herself, in the solipsism of grief, alone. But she soon meets other sufferers. There is the reclusive Charlotte, whom Anna recognizes as an acquaintance from the old days in London; her real name is Portia Whitehead, and she was formerly a flamboyant socialite straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh, given to strong drink and opinions, and famous for having shown up in public wearing only a tasteful string of pearls. What has withered this once ebullient child? Anna is also taken up by Iris Beaugrave-Mallory-Heron, wealthy, much married, brittle and pathetically dependent on the younger men who keep using and abandoning her. By accident, Anna stumbles across a horrible object in her new friend's possession: a tape recording of Iris' son, mocking his mother while swallowing sleeping pills in the act of suicide.

One bright spot for Anna among all this mordancy is Catalina, a Spanish girl who works at the hotel and who seems to take special care with the flowers she arranges in Anna's room each morning. Before long, Anna has become obsessed with this young woman: "In the evenings when I had a drink or two I would allow myself to think of her, as I might a painting or a beautiful garden. I would dwell on her body the way I never allowed myself to dwell on my own, exploring it with invisible hands, invisible eyes, touching her tentatively and without shame."

At this point, The High Road seems on the verge of becoming a distaff Death in Venice, with another cerebral outsider succumbing to forbidden passion for an enchanting youth. But O'Brien does not bring to this situation any of the doomed morbidity that hovers over Thomas Mann's tale. For one thing, Anna is much too brisk and sensible to believe herself trapped by any fate. And the physical world of the Spanish seacoast is too astonishing to allow prolonged brooding. Remembering misty Ireland and rainy London, Anna is constantly dazzled by the light: "The sun blazed and emphasized everything, sugar crumbs on a plate which the previous person had left, the white gold of the watch, a parrot on its lead, its greenness seeming to vibrate." Such moments partake of the miraculous. Equally remarkable is O'Brien's ability to make Anna's narrative seem casual, almost random, when in fact each incident, each encounter, adds another piece to a puzzle that Anna must solve. The villagers begin to mutter when they see the foreign woman so often in the company of Catalina. Anna, who thinks she has retreated to this place because she has loved and lost, must learn from her young friend that true devotion can begin only when loss and sacrifice are taken for granted.