Set in modern, strife-torn Ireland, the novel examines relationships through war on several levels. Most obviously is the ongoing conflict of the IRA and terrorism, which is, in a basic form, aimed at freeing Ireland from the controls of England. The other war is much more personal, as O'Brien notes, "a war of the heart." The protagonist Josie O'Meara is an elderly lady living in her large and lonely house in the country. She has survived her husband who was killed in IRA fighting. Through flashbacks, we learn that her husband was a violent and cruel man. We learn also that over the years of their marriage, she slowly managed to gain and maintain some degree of self-respect and hence survival. The novel centers around IRA terrorist McGeevy who hides in Josie's house. When he breaks in and informs her that he will be hiding out, she is aware of two conflicting emotions—she is fearful of the terrorist, yet she is emboldened by his presence. Between them develops a deep understanding of life, loss, and purpose.
Biography of Edna O’Brien
Edna O'Brien was born in western Ireland in 1936 in a rural Catholic farming community. In 1952 she moved to London where she raised her two sons. Since 1986 she has taught creative writing at City College of the City University of New York. She is a recognized writer, receiving the Kingsley Amis Award (1962) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1990). O'Brien has written over twenty works (novels and short story collections) including Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), The High Road (1988), The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue (1989), Time and Tide (1990), House of Splendid Isolation (1995), and most recently the novel Down by the River (1997). Among her half-dozen collections of stories are A Scandalous Woman (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), and Lantern Slides (1990). She has also written stories for juveniles, stage plays, television plays, and screenplays, and has been a contributor to magazines such as the New Yorker, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan.
About her writing about war (in the house, land, heart) in her novel, House of Splendid Isolation, she says,
I certainly think they're [the Irish] more turbulent. They're more turbulent by disposition and by language. And their history has made them suffer a hell of a lot. I have written about strife between mother and child, between husband and wife, and, in "House of Splendid Isolation," between two parts of the same country.
An IRA man told me once, "When you're shooting, you don't feel. But when you've shot him, you do feel, because half of you hopes you got him, and the other half hopes you didn't. Because we're all Irish under the skin." That to me was a story about war.
War, whether it's between man and woman, or different parts of a country, or different nations, is always, always more complicated than just the two sides. It is that I want to write about. It's the dilemma and conflict within the obvious dilemma that matters. It would be impossible for a writer with any awareness at all about the human psyche and the human condition not to write about wars, whatever locale they are. Because people do disagree with each other; they do sometimes forgive one another, and then they re-disagree with one another. Life is not a placid pool; it's a raging, storming sea, which we're all in. And maybe I, being from the race I am, pay more attention to that than to the gentler aspects. But then, that's my fate. (http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/olv2n3.html)
I do not see into male sensibility as clearly as into female. This is not unusual; very few writers have made the gender leap, with the exception of Rabelais, Joyce, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, who indeed wrote as convincingly about women as about men. No woman writer has achieved that. In the case of House of Splendid Isolation, I wanted to write about an IRA soldier, not from perceived opinion of him, but to explore his thinking, rationale, conflict, ruthlessness vs. idealism, etc. and for this I saw many prisoners who talked to me openly. The character of McGeevy is more rounded, complex, and probably truthful than any of my former male characters. (http://www.bookwire.com/HMR/Review/tobrien.html)
Book discussion questions for House of Splendid Isolation
- What is the IRA? O'Brien makes reference to 1916 several times throughout the novel in connection with the Irish Nationalism. What is the significance of this date and the events that took place?
- Describe the relationship of Josie and her husband, James. How did he die?
- Why does McGeevy act as he does toward Josie after he breaks in? Why does he save her when she has gotten lost in the fog? Why does he come back to her house at the end?
- Describe Josie's feelings about McGeevy and about the IRA.
- On page 232 (Penguin edition), O'Brien writes,
But to be close in body or bayonet is not enough. To go in, within, is the bloodiest journey of all. Inside, you get to know—that the same blood and the same tears drop from the enemy as from the self, though not always in the same proportion. To go right into the heart of the hate and the wrong and to sup from it and to be supped. It does not say that in the books. That is the future knowledge. The knowledge that is to be.
Discuss this passage in terms of Josie and James' relationship, McGeevy's and Josie's relationship, and the larger issue of Ireland and the IRA.
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