The title refers to a memorial event in Sarajevo on April 6, 2012, marking the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs. 11,541 red chairs -- one for each Sarajevan killed during the nearly four years of the siege -- were arranged in rows for a half mile down Titova Street, the high street of the city. 643 of the chairs were smaller, representing the 643 children killed during the siege.
In part, but only in part, Edna O'Brien's astonishing novel THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS is about the violence and evil unleashed in Bosnia by the Serbs. A major character is Vladimir Dragan, who is the slightly altered fictional counterpart of Radovan Karadžić, the "Butcher of Bosnia", who hid out for twelve years before being arrested in 2008 and tried for war crimes. In O'Brien's novel, a man calling himself Dr. Vladimir Dragan shows up in the bucolic country town of Cloonoila in western Ireland. Dragan says he is from Montenegro and he advertises himself as a "healer and sex therapist". He displays crystals, recites poetry and incantations, and performs healing massages. He charms nearly everyone he encounters, especially females -- and one in particular, Fidelma, the draper's wife. As the novel proceeds -- careening from event to event, almost-but-not-quite-out-of-control like a toboggan down an icy chute -- Dragan is captured and eventually brought to trial in The Hague. All the while Dragan steadfastly maintains his innocence and tries to manipulate everyone he meets. He truly is satanic. (As a fictional personification of evil, Vladimir Dragan reminds me of Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West".)
The central character of the novel, however, is Fidelma. And the most prominent theme, in the end, is not the violence and evil of Dr. Dragan and the Bosnian civil war, but rather "an ordinary woman" in a world that revolves primarily around the principles and desires of men -- a theme that, based on my rather limited experience of reading her, seems central to O'Brien's fiction. Fidelma is married to Jack, who is twenty years older. Jack first saw Fidelma "in an orchard, a young girl just ripening, with a crop of black hair and the whitest skin". She was inordinately shy, and she aspired to be a poet. She settled for marriage to an older man who turns out to be a loner and for running a women's clothing boutique that goes belly-up after construction of the new highway that bypasses Cloonoila. She realizes that she wants a child, and so she is drawn to the mystery and seductions of Dr. Vladimir Dragan. She becomes pregnant. That is when she falls through the rabbit hole. The worst thing that happens to her is when she is kidnapped by three Bosnian survivors of Dragan's violence -- in a hideously harrowing scene they do unto her what Dragan had done unto them and theirs. Broken and disgraced and thoroughly alienated from Jack, Fidelma goes to London and lives among other refugees (human flotsam and jetsam) from around the world, working at various subsistence jobs such as cleaning office buildings and the cages of a dog kennel. Towards the end of the novel, she attends the final arguments of Dragan's trial in The Hague and even manages a profoundly unsatisfactory meeting with him.
Yet another theme of THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS is globalization. It is particularly evident in the part of the novel set in London, where Fidelma mixes with refugees from Sierra Leone (Jasmeen gives her a bed in her apartment for many weeks), Mozambique (Bluey runs an employment service and sends Fidelma off on two of her jobs), Senegal (Oghowen endured a clitorectomy as a girl), Zimbabwe, Argentina, and, poignantly, Bosnia. But the tides of globalization have even reached the backwater of Cloonoila in western Ireland. The staff at the Castle, a luxury hotel and restaurant, includes Burmese, Italians, Spaniards, Czechs, Lithuanians, Slovakians, and Poles. There is even Mujo, short for Muhammad, who is from Bosnia; he is a busboy at the hotel, and at a posh dinner where Dr. Dragan is one of the guests Mujo sees and recognizes him for who he was in the past, leading to Dragan's unmasking.
O'Brien's narrative technique is quite impressive, as is her confidence in that technique. She dispenses with many of the common setting-the-stage devices, and as a result the novel bursts with energy and forward propulsion. There are dozens of characters, many limned with just a few words. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS is sprawling and rather untidy. But more importantly, it is powerful and memorable. Not the least astonishing thing about it is that it was published when Edna O'Brien was eighty-five.
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Beauty and the 'Beast of Bosnia'
Edna O’Brien is in her late 80s and, boy, can she still cut the literary mustard. THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS is very close to a masterpiece, up there with the best of this extraordinary author’s oeuvre. And - short of writing about Trump or Brexit - it’s as contemporary as you can get.A refugee Balkan ‘faith healer’ sets out his stall in a small village on the Irish coast. The locals fall under his spell, none more so than Fidelma McBride, the draper’s wife, childless and unhappy. Fidelma manages to – almost – keep their affair a secret. But then ‘Doctor Vlad’ is exposed as the exact opposite of what he claims to be. He’s a war criminal, the 'Beast of Bosnia', wanted for trial in The Hague.Fidelma’s life takes an awful turn after this revelation. I won’t give away any more of the plot, but an agonizing event follows Vlad’s arrest and there’s another grim chapter in a London asylum centre where several refugees narrate their stories, of Bosnia and elsewhere in this ruined world in this ruined time.Whether she’s writing of love or of war, O’Brien’s prose fairly dances off the page. This magnificent book possesses a magic of its own, a terrible beauty. The most poignant novel I’ve read in a long time; indeed one of the best ever on the mighty theme of War and Peace.[Reviewer is the author of THE BEXHILL MISSILE CRISIS]
Top reviews from other countries
BigLooLaa
Harrowing yet hopeful, it's not perfect but it is mostly brilliant.
Reviewed in Canada on August 2, 2016