DATE: Sunday, July 20, 1997                 TAG: 9707100655

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE 

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

``DOWN BY THE RIVER'' BECOMES SAD MELODRAMA

DOWN BY THE RIVER

EDNA O'BRIEN

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 265 pp. $23.

Don't Irish writers have any happy stories to tell? Decades ago, with Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce helped transform poverty, Catholicism and overpopulation into the staples of Irish storytelling. Just last year, from these same ingredients, Frank McCourt created the heartbreaking masterpiece, Angela's Ashes.

Now adding to this gloomy narrative tradition is Edna O'Brien's 19th book, Down By the River, a bleak story of father-daughter incest set in modern Ireland. O'Brien began her writing career in the 1960s, and (too close to Joyce for the comfort of some) her work has been banned in her native country. Little wonder. Down By the River deals with abortion, religion and politics, the holy trinity of inflammatory topics.

At times, Down By the River reads like a twisted Lolita, extra-heavy on the dolor, except that O'Brien's man-brute, James - unlike Humbert Humbert - has no love for his little nymphet. Mary, James' 13-year-old daughter, is a ``poor little waif in ankle socks,'' a lass with ``the down of youth on (her) arms and . . . legs.''

When we first see father and daughter, they are digging around in a bog, the ancient mire of Ireland wherein ``old mutinies'' lurk and sometimes resurface. There, against a background of blackberries and foxglove and ``big furry bees,'' James violates his daughter, completing a full circle better left undone: ``His essence, hers, their two essences one.''

Unaware of all this is Mary's mother, Bridget. She dies of cancer early on in the novel, and Mary replaces her as head female on the family farm. Shame and fear prevent Mary from telling anyone about the rape. For a time, she successfully avoids her father - simply by going to school and staying with friends. But James is a wily man with a propensity for whiskey, and soon a second rape occurs. ``I would like to live in a city,'' Mary says later, ``because if you scream someone can hear you.''

After this trauma, Mary flees to Galway where she meets Luke, a golden-haired busker who lets her stay at his flat. The scenes in Galway are some of the best in the book, slices of Irish bohemia alive with jugglers, pennywhistlers and accordion players - a treat for the reader and Mary, until the police find her and she is forced to return to the farm.

What Mary wants the most she has small hope of getting in Ireland: an abortion. With the help of a friend, she travels to England for the procedure, only to have her efforts foiled by a group of zealous pro-lifers. The long arm of Irish law pulls her back from the brink of abortion and, once again, she returns home. To make matters worse, her story is leaked to the press, and Mary is soon in all the papers, as well as a hot topic on talk radio.

As the tension mounts between anti-abortionists and those who believe in freedom of choice, the aesthetic of the novel takes a nose dive. Down By the River sheds any pretense at subtlety, adopting instead the shrill tones of melodrama.

``Rosaries and ovaries, I don't know which does the most damage to this country,'' a doctor remarks at one point.

O'Brien inflates this issue into a soap opera of a story, using militant Catholics and softhearted, liberal barristers - stereotypes who compensate in cliches for what they lack in originality - in a game of tug-of-war over Mary's life. Granting her the freedom to have an English abortion becomes a job for the Irish judicial system. By the time the court reaches a verdict, in the book's contrived and disappointing conclusion, the decision makes no difference to either Mary or the reader.

What motivates James to violate Mary in the first place is not clear. Throughout the novel, O'Brien plays up his uncivilized side. He doesn't know how to drive a car: ``I only ride horses,'' he says. ``Horseflesh.'' In a world in which men ``hold the reins'' - from God above to the barristers below - this seems appropriate. James represents a dark undercurrent in the novel, the tension that exists between the wild and the tame, the pagan and Christian.

He isn't the only one in the book with misdirected passions. In another telling scene, a priest arrives at an anti-abortion meeting, and the women there simper his name suggestively: ``Father's here . . . Father's here,'' and ``some (do) little things to their hair and (touch) up their lipsticks.'' It's as though Elvis had just entered the building. This scene is a bit perverse because desire - once again - has gone awry.

O'Brien seems to be explaining such behavior when she has an Irish barrister say: ``We're pagans . . . . Pagan urges run in our blood. . . . Pagan lust . . . it's why we need God so badly.''

This idea is provocative, part of the dark spell O'Brien casts over the reader at first. What Down By the River offers in the end, though, is tired melodrama, a hysteria that feels all too familiar in the '90s. The prose is pretty, the story is suspenseful at times, but the thrills in Down By the River seem just plain cheap. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk.

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