Mother's Dying, Daughter's Not Living in `The Light of Evening'

``The Light of Evening'' by Edna O'Brien; Houghton Mifflin ($25)

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The greatest storytellers are those who best discern the interior dramas that human beings suffer and inflict in silence - "hearts contracting day by day," people "visiting little malices on one another in lieu of their missed happiness." It's territory that Irish author Edna O'Brien knows as well as any writer alive, something abundantly demonstrated in her masterful new novel "The Light of Evening.''

Seventy-eight-year-old Dilly has been driven from her beloved house to a Dublin hospital. She has ovarian cancer.

Dilly's wish is that her daughter Eleanora will come visit her. Eleanora, as it happens, is a famous writer living in London, whose books have often scandalized her countrymen and who eloped with an older man - also a writer, with an Eastern European background - by whom she had two children and from whom she has long been divorced.

Those familiar with O'Brien's life will note the similarities between Eleanora and her creator, whose novels were once banned in Ireland and who was married - most unhappily - to the Irish-Czech author Ernest Gebler (who even claimed to have written her first books).

But the real similarity is between mother and daughter. What Dilly says of her own mother, Eleanora could just as easily say of Dilly: "We were always at loggerheads, my mother and me, both being very stubborn and strong-willed." Geography notwithstanding, however, Dilly and Eleanora are inextricably bound to each other - as the very structure of O'Brien's novel makes manifest.

It comprises eight parts, bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. Part 1 is a straightforward third-person narrative, introducing us to Dilly and culminating in her arrival at the hospital, where she is given sedatives that cause her to dream of her past - in the first-person narrative of Part 2.

The young Dilly traveled to America - to Brooklyn - and worked as a domestic and in a dress factory. She met a man named Gabriel, a tall, bearded lumberjack, who became the love of her life. Tricked, however, by one of those "little malices" into thinking he has betrayed her, Dilly returned to Ireland and married Eleanora's father.

Part 2 has its counterpart in Part 4, an account of Eleanora's marriage to Hermann - "all those giddy and high-flown notions of love learned from books were swept away amid the realization that she had blundered into enemy territory." After they move to London, the marriage comes completely apart when Eleanora finds success as a writer.

Eventually, Eleanora does come to see Dilly in the hospital. The scene is but a single chapter in Part 4, for the visit is brief. Eleanora tells Dilly she has to go back to a conference she has been attending in Scandinavia, but she really is returning to the man she has met there - to another of the loveless sexual encounters Eleanora seems to have a knack for.

In her haste to get away, Eleanora leaves behind her journal, which makes up Part 6 and which Dilly reads. The counterpart to the journal is Dilly's letters - gathered in Part 8 - in which Eleanora learns something she could never have imagined about her mother.

As in every Edna O'Brien novel, language takes its place front and center. Every detail sparkles and sings: "A few stars still in the sky but pale and milky as stars are, in the early hours before they slip away."

Dilly is beautifully and lovingly drawn, but Eleanora remains something of a mystery, as much to herself as to the reader. During the hospital visit, a kindly nun - Sister Consolata - decides to give mother and daughter some privacy: "As she swishes the curtain on its metal runner Eleanora relives the terror of the sliding wooden hatch of the confessional, in childhood, being drawn back and the beefy face of the priest looming through the dark grille." Yet in her journal she writes of going into analysis: "Fifty minutes every Friday devoted to raking up the past. Herr Inquisitor on a chair behind me stock-still." She does not notice the irony.

In the end, it is Sister Consolata who brings Eleanora what little consolation comes her way - "and it was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for those first full and brimming feelings that were the best of me, but that had died."

The focus may be soft in "The Light of Evening," but the truths it illuminates are hard as diamonds.

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.