"The Ireland you're chasing is a dream … doesn't exist anymore…. It's gone. It's with O'Leary in the grave." That's what we're told. The heroes have become terrorist, Queen Maeve is a battered wife, the big house is derelict. As Mary Hooligan says at the end of Edna O'Brien's novel Night (1972), "The harp that once through Tara's halls is silenced, mute." Baba, one of the original "country girls" from the fine Irish trilogy that made O'Brien's name in the 1960s, looks back on the past, twenty-five years later, in a bitter "Epilogue" written in 1987. She savages anything that will tear at her heartstrings as "pure slop": "Too fucking elegiac." Yet Baba ends her retrospect lamenting. "I want time to be put back, I want it to be yesterday." And even Mary Hooligan, long exiled from the "glorified bog" of her birth, calls out, "O Connemara, oh sweet mauve forgotten hills." In House of Splendid Isolation, too, "Romantic Ireland" is far from dead and gone. It's lurking all over the place. Cuchulain rides again, blue eyes blaze once more, legends and ghosts return to haunt us. The past is execrated, but the past is yearned for. The grim realities all have soft centers.

The plot itself makes you feel you have been here before. A notorious escaped terrorist from the North, McGreevy, known as "the Beast," breaks into a house in the west of Ireland. He's heard about it from an IRA sympathizer who used to work there, and it's well-placed for the job he has to do, the killing of a retired British judge (an echo of the assassination of Mountbatten in 1979) who takes his holidays boating on the lake nearby. (This is a return to O'Brienland, the boggy and mountainous country near Limerick, around the Shannon and Lough Derg, the part of Ireland, it is said, that holds "the powers of darkness in it.")

McGreevy first terrifies, then builds up a relationship with, the elderly widow, Josie, who is living in the house alone after a period in a nursing home. Their confrontation requires him to justify his life to her, and requires her to recall her past. Meanwhile a net closes around him. The local guard, Rory (who goes deer hunting in his spare time, laments his lost athletic youth and has a personal obsession with catching "the Beast"), is on his trail. He picks up the clues he needs from Josie, and from the girl who loves McGreevy and believes in his cause—her mother still calls the police the Black and Tans. Yes, thinks the mother, it is going to be "a fateful night on the mountain." And so it proves.

This strong but familiar story, revolving around the tense relationship between the terrorist and his unwilling host, is something like Brian Moore's Lies of Silence, but without his spare, driving pace; or like Cal, but without the sex. There is sex in the novel, of course, but it's in Josie's past, and all of it is bad. Her relationships follow the usual course of women's lives in O'Brien's fiction. Her kind of heroine is summed up by this sentence in Time and Tide (1992), which describes a woman victimized by a grotesquely hateful husband: "Her emotions were all tangled and she yearned now for a massive love." What an O'Brien heroine mostly gets instead is a massive martyrdom, especially if (as in one of her best stories, "A Scandalous Woman") she is living in Ireland, "a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women."

Josie is no exception. Driven away from her home by a jealous mother into years of servitude as a maid in Brooklyn, she returned to Ireland as the bride of "a man she scarcely knew," to find herself captive to a sad, violent drunkard who abuses and rapes her (or in O'Brien-speak, "mounts her with a lingual gusto"), and who has always in his eyes "a vacancy, like a lost stunned animal, far from home." The local men are all the same, either loathing her, like her husband's brother, or lusting after her, like the doctor who thinks of her as "a woman asking to be broken in," or worshipping her from afar, like Paud, who has two simple passions, his mistress and a united Ireland. There's only one exception, the gorgeous cultured priest ("his eyes were dark," "his smile was utter") who drives her into a frenzy of fantasized romance. ("In a silence they will couple, their shadow selves going beyond the gates of propriety to the deeper hungers within…. They are meant, like tubers under winter bedding.") But he turns out to be as terrified of women as the rest of them. She aborts her child, the priest humiliates her, her husband is killed in a messy accident, she goes mad.

All this is laid on so thick because Josie has to stand in for Ireland's troubles. Her "isolation" in the old house is like the island's, claustrophobic and cut off from the rest of the world in its own bitter commitment to the past. Like those who long to unite the country, she longs to die "whole." Like her, Ireland has been abused and raped and has killed its own children. The child she has killed makes an appearance at the start and the end of the novel (like the ghost-child in Toni Morrison's Beloved), speaking of the deaths and the weeping and the blood of the country and the need for enemies to understand each other.

A feminist message intermittently makes itself heard through this analogy between the woman and the country. The cruelty of terrorism has its sources, it is suggested, in the way men treat women in this land of shame and murder. "If women ran your organization there would be no shooting," Josie tells McGreevy. (He is not convinced.) Stronger than any protest, though, is the sense of fatalism and helplessness, always present in O'Brien's treatment of women's lives, but here reaching outward from the domestic to the political. All are at the mercy of "something fateful that is to be," which will re-enact yet once more the fatefulness of the past. Like Josie, "soaked in the yeast" of her terrible memories, so Ireland is held to ransom by what are variously and predictably described as the chains, the grip and the dark threads of history.

To make this plain, Irish myth and legend, song and story, infiltrate the present-day story. The legends of Guaire and Diarmait, St. Caimin and St. Calum, Queen Maeve and Cuchulain, the story of the Colleen Bawn, the songs commemorating Michael Collins and Kevin Barry, fill the air. Everyone knows the stories and the songs. So the interesting question is raised of who can claim to be the more truly Irish, who is entitled to inherit these myths. Is it the terrorist from the North, spouting Gaelic to show that he is "a far better keeper of the country's soul and the country's heritage," or the young Catholic policemen who capture him, their heads also full of their country's history? "We're all Irish under the skin," says one of them. Who is the more Irish—politicians, men of violence, women? Mutual inheritance and mutual responsibility is argued—that no one, North or South, can escape this war; and that it is only the ordinary people (the argument, also, of Lies of Silence) who can bring it to an end.

But the novel's Celtic sentiment fatally softens and blurs its treatment of harsh realities. "The songs get to one," thinks one of the policemen, revealingly. Josie sings a song of the Fenian heroes and had an uncle who was killed by the Black and Tans. That was all different, we're repeatedly told. This is not 1916: "These guys are without conscience, without ideals and with only one proclamation, money and guns and murder, guns and money." McGreevy is one of "these guys." But, bound by an oath to the liberation of his country, amber-eyed, redheaded, famously cunning, he begins to look suspiciously like a reincarnation of Cuchulain. He's a somewhat shadowy, over-romanticized character, with "a sort of radiance" emanating from him, "something stubborn and young and alone and tender about him." Josie, too, with her blue eyes and deep passions and cruel past, has a riskily folkloric air. Certain mysterious events at the book's tragic end suggest that she may herself become a legend, another Queen Maeve.

And Irish stereotypes are as ubiquitous as Irish myths. There's the lecherous eccentric neighbor, there's Brid the servant-girl who dreams of meeting her lover "in the soft unruly underlay of bog and bogland, everything seeping into her, his instrument in tooraloora fettle," there's the lovely young girl devoted to her revolutionary hero. Only in the brief sightings of the local townspeople, peevish and gossipy, something sharper and funnier comes through. More of this satire, and less keening, would have been welcome.

And more pace, too. In spite of the drama of the plot, the writing feels ponderous and slow, even flabby. There is not enough self-editing: "He stands above McGreevy, possessed of a cold and furious determination to smash through that lashing radius of hate and fanaticism to get to him"; "There are moments in life when a great softness is coupled with a great hardness." One particular mannerism, of turning verbs and adjectives into nouns—meant perhaps to sound vaguely Irish—makes everything feel passive and inert: "There was a jealousy in her"; "A fecklessness had taken root in him"; "There was something animal within the stillness of him"; "An urgency in her limbs, a precognition of what was to be"; "A great lunatic fork of longing rose up in her"; "A loneliness in it, the ache of a man hoping"; "In every jawline, a setness, a gravity betokening this appointment with morality"; "a terrible gravity to him." No one sets his or her jaw or feels feckless, everyone endures the condition of jawsetness or fecklessness. It makes no difference if we are reading the child's voice, or the main narrative, or Josie's diary or the journal of Josie's uncle, an Irish Volunteer fighting against British rule: it all sounds the same, solemn, portentous and clichéd. It comes as no surprise to hear that the moans of an Irish cow in labor had "something primeval in them." After a while you begin to wait for someone to say that this was a beautiful and tragic land. And sure enough someone does: "What beautiful countryside, what serenity, what a beautiful tragic country to be born into," thinks the policeman. The policeman? In O'Brien's country, that's how policemen talk.