[In the following review, Mantel offers a favorable assessment of Down by the River, but faults O'Brien for what she perceives as overly pedantic, elaborate prose and a tendency to exhaustively reiterate issues.]

Out in the country things get very murky," says Mary, the protagonist of Down by the River, Edna O'Brien's forlorn, unsparing and consciously exquisite novel of rural despair. Ireland is Ms. O'Brien's mother country, and mothers, as we know, are often capricious, often rejecting, often unwilling to mother at all. Mary is about to be a mother and unwilling to be so: because she is not quite 14 years old, and because the baby is the product of incest with her father.

Mary's own mother has died a premature and painful death; the child has nowhere to turn. She is unable to tell anyone of her plight, though she tries to signal it. She also tries to drown herself, but is prevented by a neighbor out walking her dog. The neighbor, Betty, arranges for them to travel to England, where she can obtain a legal abortion. Before it can take place, Mary is pressured into returning to Ireland. There she is passed from hand to hand. Opponents of abortion offer compassion for the child but little for the mother. She receives the conscience-dogged sympathy of quivering liberals, the quizzical and qualified aid of lawyers who fight for her right to travel freely. The weeks go by, the little prisoner inside her flourishes. Then nature solves her problem, in its own ghastly fashion.

The novel's clearest link to real life is to the 1992 case of a 14-year-old Irish girl, said to have been a rape victim, whose struggles with the legal system wrung hearts on both sides of the Irish Sea and caused in Ireland itself a nation wide examination of conscience. But behind the story lies a significant swath of women's history: years of winking and connivance, of deceit and fear and pain—concealment of pregnancy, unattended births, infant corpses. The retired midwife of Mary's district recalls "the silenced creatures she had found in drawers and wardrobes and in bolster cases, like sleeping dolls: a little baby boy in a lavatory bowl, twins with binding twine around their necks."

This is powerful material, and Ms. O'Brien has apparently decided her prose must rise to it. The reader may feel some initial queasiness. "O sun O brazen egg-yolk albatross." Unripe blackberries are "little excrescenses purposing to come forth in a pained fruition." In this novel, all fruition is pained. There is a harrowing description of a mare struggling to give birth to a foal presenting feet first. The mare's life is saved, and the foal safely delivered—by Mary's father. It is one of Ms. O'Brien's subtleties that he is not a brute, through his actions are often brutal. Witnessing his tenderness to the creatures, Mary thinks "that if she could be a child, maybe if she can be truly a child and make her needs known, he can feel as a father."

There is no lack of human sympathy in Down by the River, and a powerful perception of loneliness runs through it. Mary is surrounded by people who want to control her and own her, rather than people who want to help her. In her own district, she attracts odium merely for existing, merely because controversy has soiled "our beautiful, wholesome happy parish." For a short time it is believed that the father of her baby is a street musician she met in Galway, and when the police talk about this kindly, hapless man, Ms. O'Brien captures all the scorn and rage of people who believe they have never put a foot wrong: "I work my butt off, seven days a week. I work overtime to buy shoes for my kids…. I grow my own vegetables…. I don't permit myself a drink, I don't go to the dogs. I don't go to the bookmakers while he and his ilk sponge off the nation, beget children…. Holy Christ, I'd send the lot of them down the mine and dynamite it."

The wider community won't help Mary either. A radio phone-in program is choked with evil banalities; some callers abuse Mary and some assert her right to travel to England, but the show's host assures them. "You're all one hundred and ten percent right." And God is of no use, no matter how many times He is invoked. Before her pregnancy, desperate to escape from the abuse, Mary visits a shrine, but she can do no more than leave a coded message: "Please cure my father's epilepsy." Later, she finds a statue of the Sacred Heart with its head detached. She becomes, with reason, "ashamed of the habit of hoping."

Ms. O'Brien's best moments are a heady blend of insight, intellect and poetry. Four vases of flowers in a hospital ward are "carnations lined along the windowsills in opaque hospital vases, a little flourish of white gypsophila over each one, like nurses' caps." Mary watches her cousin Veronica—one of her unofficial warders, one of the suicide watch—work with a crochet needle "so that a piece of straight thread was converted into a tight and unrippable little conundrum."

That is what encloses Mary: a tight and unrippable conundrum, legal, moral physical. Why, then, despite the sensuous, violent prose, is the reader able to detach from her and think so hard about the problems of the novel itself? Perhaps because Mary as a three-dimensional human being is hardly present in her own story. She is featureless, like some scarred, depopulated battleground. Our anxiety on her behalf remains impersonal; our outrage is aimed at her society rather than her circumstances. She is as innocent as Mary, Mother of God; she passes from Virgin to Mother, her physical condition an interesting one, but her moral travail hidden from us.

Then again, Ms. O'Brien writes orgy prose, dripping and rich and fantastic. Her ironies are crushing, not piercing, and the seriousness and dignity of her undertaking is marred by a solemnity that sometimes trips her. Mary's mother, besotted with her farmyard flocks of fowl, will die of ovarian cancer, images are stretched, themes are beaten. When Mary escapes briefly to a convent boarding school, the first night's supper is "egg salad and single slices of cheese." A paragraph later, Mary's mother writes to her to say they miss her: "Your father is not hard-boiled." Ms. O'Brien also suffers from a lack of flexibility in tone. A report in a "rag of a newspaper" sounds more like Edna O'Brien. Mary's diary sounds like her too.

How should Mary sound? What is the best manner for her story? That the problems of the poor, the powerless and the deprived have their own moral grandeur, no one denies. But in what manner to address them—in the grand manner? That is what Ms. O'Brien has chosen. "Nearly everything reminded her of blood. Her father's, her mother's, her ancestors', her own." When poetry and polemic mix, the sublime may happen; what results here is a kind of rococo indignation, clean lines obscured by language that is often ornate and sometimes florid. A novel, of course, is not a how-to book for legislators or a manual of moral etiquette. Yet Ms. O'Brien, whose early books were censored, has no doubt played her own part in changing the climate of her native country. Earlier in her career, she wrote with a wit and ferocity that were enhanced by the sweetness and simplicity of her style. Her old weapons were sharp and effective; perhaps she comes too late to this particular fight.