SPOILER ALERT, LET me note, since I can't think of a way to write about this novel without noting the curveball that occurs at its midpoint.
The first half is set in a small, somewhat isolated town in Ireland. A stranger arrives, apparently eastern European in origin, and sets up shop as a sex-therapist or life coach or new age guru or masseur--anyway, he's a hit, even with the nuns and priests. He is a special hit with Fidelma McBride, not exactly middle-aged but no longer young, leader of the local book club, a woman of sensibilité.
There are signs that the new arrival, Dr. Vlad, has a complicated past and may not be what he claims to be. Fidelma is married, making her interest in him, which soon becomes sexual, adulterous. Still, I thought we were headed towards an Irish Music Man with Vlad as Harold Hill and Fidelma as Marian the Librarian--the simple virtues of the small town will redeem him, he will redeem the small town from its hidebound narrowness, life will proceed happily....
No such luck. Vlad is a war criminal, a kind of Radovan Karadzic figure. He is spotted, arrested, hauled off to the Hague for his trial. Fidelma is pregnant, but she is found by Vlad's former body guards, who (in revenge for what they see as his betrayal and abandonment of them) abort the fetus and nearly kill her. Shattered, she ends up in London, where she slowly and painfully reassembles what she can of her selfhood.
This is the only O'Brien novel I have read. Philip Roth, a longtime fan, called it her masterpiece. Maybe it is. She certainly throws a mean curveball.
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