‘Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story’ Review: Illuminating Portrait of the Great Irish Writer Explores the Solitude of Success

In a diary entry from May 1967, read by Jessie Buckley at the start of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, the subject writes: “Ah, the trees, how tortured they are. If anyone has to ask me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed and stark and misshapen but ferociously tenacious.” That observation swiftly captures O’Brien’s passionate love-hate relationship with her homeland. At the same time, it anchors this intimate portrait in nature, the refuge to which the writer would return throughout her turbulent life, finding more freedom in the fields of County Clare than anyplace else.

One of the many pleasures of Sinéad O’Shea’s engaging, tender and lovingly crafted documentary is listening to the writer talk, in countless archival interviews and even more so in a wide-ranging sit-down with the filmmaker near the end of O’Brien’s life. It’s like listening to music, her sentences flowing like fully formed nuggets of prose — vivid, precise, richly descriptive. She was a consummate literary stylist, even in conversation, but always thoughtful, grounded and unafraid to speak the truth, no matter how bluntly.

Like so many writers and artists, O’Brien began practicing her craft as an escape from unhappy reality, inventing more exotic lives in her head as a child. Her father was a hard drinker who gambled away his landowner family’s wealth, selling off most of the farm piece by piece until only the large house remained, the money gone by the time she was born in 1930.

Her mother, who would endure a married life of bullying and abuse, was in her 40s by then. Edna was the youngest of four children. Looking back in her 90s, she says her mother didn’t want her at first but then swung to the opposite extreme: “I became her guardian, her shield, her reason for existence, wanting me ultimately and utterly.”

O’Brien is frank in her observations on childhood trauma and its lingering effect. An affecting archival clip, captured long after the author had run off to England in virtual exile and then made peace with the religious parents against whom she rebelled, shows her perched on the living room window ledge while her father sits in an armchair softly singing “Danny Boy.” She admits being unable to separate that cozy familial scene from memories of his violence toward them. And yet her thoughts of him as she approaches her own death are among the most moving of the film’s personal reflections.

She began distancing herself from suffocating family life and her “one-horse, one-hotel town with 27 pubs” when she moved to Dublin in the early 1950s, eventually landing a job writing a weekly magazine column. She bought a cheap copy of T.S. Eliot’s introduction to James Joyce and carried it with her everywhere. (Joyce became an entryway into her own fiction; she would publish a well-received biography of him in 1999.) But, as one interviewee, Gabriel Byrne, points out, the Irish literary scene at that time was “a male preserve,” and women were unwelcome at their gathering places.

O’Brien’s world opened up when she met the cosmopolitan writer Ernest Gébler and began spending weekends with him at his country home. Gébler was 40, divorced and a Communist, his politics a holdover from his Czech origins. The violent intervention of her scandalized family after they learn of the relationship via an anonymous note is a shocking episode. Nonetheless, O’Brien marries him.

That marriage, as much as life with her father, would color what one interviewer later calls “a depressing vision of men” that runs through her novels. Her unfiltered response is that men are generally shallow and untruthful: “They expect a woman to be a goddess, a whore, a mother and a breadwinner, so the only good thing about them is the occasional sexual pleasure they give us.”

The publication in 1960 of O’Brien’s debut novel, The Country Girls, was the beginning of serious disharmony in her marriage, which worsened as her success quickly eclipsed Gébler’s. They had two sons, Carlo and Sasha, who provide revealing commentary throughout. They describe their parents as “chemically unsuited” and their relationship as volatile. He was supposed to be the famous writer, not her; the sense of being wronged soured him.

Having found O’Brien’s diaries, Gébler began adding annotations in which he claimed credit for shaping her work, even suggesting that he rewrote an entire manuscript. When the books started selling and checks began coming in, he would force her to endorse them and hand them over, giving her only a small weekly sum for housekeeping. His contempt for her is evident in his handwriting in a family photo album under a picture of her with the boys: “Before I made her famous and the rot set in.”

At the same time her home life was becoming tempestuous, O’Brien was hit by a wave of condemnation from both the Irish government and the Church. The depiction of women’s desire and sexuality in The Country Girls (the first part of a trilogy) caused both institutions to brand the novel as filth. A priest from her hometown collected copies for a bonfire, and the book was banned in Ireland, as were all her works at one point.

One academic specializing in Irish Studies notes that O’Brien was seen as a traitor to family values, revealing secrets about the still insular country that were largely hidden from the outside world and exposing Irish society’s radical inequality and deep fear of the father.

In book after book (she would publish 34 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry in her lifetime), O’Brien refused to be intimidated by the patriarchal behemoth of Ireland at the time, which did not endear her to the country’s narcissistic male writers.

It’s interesting that while the theme of women seeking freedom and love on their own terms ran through her work, suggesting classification as an important voice in feminist literature, O’Brien never positioned herself that way. Nor did the feminist movement of the ’60s and ’70s appear to embrace her.

She was championed by major American writers, including John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth and Henry Miller; British novelist Kingsley Amis in The Observer chose The Country Girls as one of his books of the year. While women writers including Louise Kennedy and Doireann Ní Ghríofa are among the film’s talking heads, there’s no mention of support from the prominent female authors of O’Brien’s time.

The doc gets into juicy detail about her glitzy socialite years in London, once she finally broke away from Gébler and found financial independence. After a decade of critically and commercially successful novels (outside Ireland), she wrote the screenplay for Zee and Co., a love-triangle drama with Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine and Susannah York. While she dismisses the project (“mauled by the filmmakers”), the £39,000 payment enabled her to buy a mansion in Chelsea, where her parties became a magnet for celebrities.

O’Brien recalls luminaries including Princess Margaret, Judy Garland, Harold Pinter and Jane Fonda among her guests. Paul McCartney visited the house and played a song for her sons, Shirley MacLaine read her palm to trace her past lives and Marianne Faithfull wandered around barefoot, setting Yeats to music. Her suitors included Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando and Richard Burton.

“It still baffles me how I came to know all these people,” says O’Brien, wryly amused. Near the end of the film — and of her life — she muses that while she enjoyed that glittering social circle for a time, it wasn’t those years that stayed in her mind but moments from her childhood: women driving cattle, being alone in the fields, her mother’s cough.

O’Shea’s exhaustive research and wealth of archival material — photographs, videos, newsreels, home movies — covers the thematic shifts in her subject’s writing in later years, as well as developments in her personal life.

With R.D. Liang, no less, O’Brien experimented with psychoanalysis and LSD, which loosened up her language and brought out a latent violence in her work, according to one interviewee. An unfulfilling six-year affair with a married British politician led to a lengthy gap in her output, and after years of profligate spending, she found herself broke and forced to sell the house.

In the late ’80s, she taught creative writing at City College in New York. Among her students was Walter Mosley, who warmly acknowledges O’Brien’s generous mentorship as instrumental in his transition from short stories to novels with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990. Around that same period, at a low ebb, O’Brien planned to commit suicide while on a book tour but a fortuitously timed message from Sasha made her reconsider.

The film touches on the controversy of later novels in which she wrote about the Troubles in Northern Ireland and was criticized for portraying Republicans in a sympathetic light. Her defense was that all the existing writing was from the other side’s perspective. Her work remained bold and vital right up to the end, notably her penultimate novel, The Little Red Chairs, about the interactions of a fictional Balkan War criminal with the women of an Irish village.

The melancholy undercurrent in O’Shea’s film comes not so much from O’Brien, who is devoid of self-pity, as from the evidence that her stature among the greats of Irish literature was fully acknowledged at home only toward the end of her life. There’s sadness also in her poor choices in men, especially considering how insightfully her work explored women’s experience of sex and love. “There were kinder men no doubt out there,” she says. “But we are who we are.”

O’Shea and editor Gretta Ohle weave the writer’s life into an enthralling portrait that gives O’Brien the recognition she deserves. But despite a life so colorful and fiercely independent, what stayed with O’Brien at the end was not the successes, the prestigious awards or the celebrity whirl. It was the indelible imprint of her childhood.

For anyone who ever had a conflicted relationship with a parent, remembrances of her final interaction with her father, when he was hospitalized, will be wrenching. “It gets lonely sometimes, Edna,” she recalls him saying, noting that it was the most honest thing he had ever said. “He was hot-tempered, foolish, but in him, as in all of us, there was always the child.”