[In the following review, Craig provides a mixed evaluation of Time and Tide.]

"Fear death by water." This injunction from The Waste Land must strike a chord with Edna O'Brien, whose earliest heroine—in The Country Girls—lost her mother in a boating accident; now, eleven novels on, it's the heroine's son who goes down with the Marchioness (as we read on the opening page of Time and Tide). This central disaster is prefaced by a lot of subsidiary disasters; the whole drift, of Time and Tide, is to show what a star-crossed Irishwoman can endure, without going under.

What is wrong with Nell, a one-time Irish country girl and mother-of-two? She has many resources, yet seems impelled to get the maximum poignancy out of life. She suffers to the full. Some kind of ancestral acrimony seems to have warped her prospects. At the start of Time and Tide, she is living on the outskirts of London, with two small sons and a terrible husband, the kind of spouse who specializes in mental cruelty, cold as any Casaubon and deeply unhinged. The family farm in Ireland isn't a refuge, containing as it does a virulent old couple—chickens' innards in the kitchen and a sour and restrictive Catholicism pervading the place. Presently Nell is separated from her husband, then divorced; the children stay with her, but only after a bitter struggle to gain custody of them. She goes to work for a publisher and rents a small Victorian house. The boys grow older and attend a boarding school. A holiday abroad proves unsatisfactory. Being far too tremulous and open-hearted for her own good. Nell is soon in the throes of an infatuation—once again, with a man as insufferable as her husband, though in a different way. This one says things like, "Transubstantiate, Sister", and leaves pretentious jottings about the place: "Life is a habit of walking and talking, I have a habit of walking towards death." Such pseudo-profundity has a period flavour, it's true, and it may be used to evoke a particular decade (the 1960s): however, in the hands of Edna O'Brien, these embarrassing utterances seem to come without a satiric, or indeed any kind of critical, undertone. One could wish to be sure that she understands their awfulness.

The problem with O'Brien's writing has always been one of excess baggage, all the heartfelt or sorrowful or fanciful trappings with which she sees fit to lumber herself. They are back again in Time and Tide. All of which obscures, but doesn't obliterate, the charm and robustness which marked her earliest novels; parts of Time and Tide are wonderfully clear-toned and powerfully imagined—for example, the section towards the end, when the pleasure-boat has sunk and relatives have been summoned, achieves a genuinely harrowing intensity. And the opening chapters, in which the wife's wrongs are recounted more or less dispassionately, recall the picturesque adversities articulated by another specialist in woman's vicissitudes, Barbara Comyns (though Comyns is more luminous, less fraught). But throughout the bulk of O'Brien's narrative, clarity gets lost in a fuzz of emotions.

Nell's story continues: in a moment of lust, she throws herself at a Russian named Boris, and shortly afterwards finds Boris and his girlfriend installed in her house, where they inadvertently cause a gas explosion which puts Nell in hospital with burns. Being in hospital renders her unable to earn money, and she loses the house when she can't pay the rent. So it goes on. No one comes to the aid of Nell. Bouts of madness, brushes with drugs, all kinds of guilt and agitation: these are among the troubles we find afflicting a heroine who isn't deficient in acumen or allure—just luckless. Her life falls into no particular shape—it merely continues, as most lives do. And, as a kind of back-up to the novelist's sense of things being asked, innumerable passers-by are allotted a single appearance in the book, to expose the bees in their bonnets and promptly fade out. Nell is constantly beset by strangers, or semi-strangers, all bent on disclosing fragments of their past. "How she gloated, how she warmed to it, pressing closer to Nell at each saucy admission…. Had smacked her. oh yes, made her black and blue …". It isn't a satisfactory means of eking out a rather meager storyline. You are irked by the abundance of arbitrary encounters. Less embellishment, or a more rigorous approach, wouldn't have gone amiss. At one point Nell, in her capacity as publishers' editor, is advising a would-be author on how to proceed, "sit with your story", she writes, "your rich, raw, bleak, relentless story … and moisten it with every drop of pain and suppuration that you have, until in the end it glistens with the exquisite glow of a freshly dredged pearl". You can see how Edna O'Brien, for all her undoubted gifts, perceptiveness, imagination, alertness and so forth, has been led astray; and you want to chime in with some contrary advice, such as: "Then tone it down."