The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien review – a chilling masterpiece

A war criminal reinvents himself in Edna O’Brien’s breathtaking new novel, her first in a decade

Edna O’Brien’s new novel, her first in a decade, has already been hailed as “her masterpiece” by that master-of-them-all Philip Roth. And he’s right. This is a spectacular piece of work, massive and ferocious and far-reaching, yet also at times excruciatingly, almost unbearably, intimate. Holding you in its clutches from first page to last, it dares to address some of the darkest moral questions of our times while never once losing sight of the sliver of humanity at their core.

It begins arrestingly. A wanted Balkan war criminal, disguised as a self-styled “holistic healer” (he quickly drops the term “sex therapist” when he clocks the responses), fetches up in a little village on the west coast of Ireland. The parallels with the “butcher of Bosnia” Radovan Karadzic cannot be accidental, but neither is the novel’s power contingent upon them. With his “white beard and white hair tied up in a top-knot”, and his talk of herbs and tinctures and his constant “spouting” of Latin verses, “Doctor Vlad” sends a ripple of suspicion through the small community. Who exactly is this exotic stranger and what can he want?

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