📚 'Rather Dated' November: Edna O'Brien's 'The Country Girls'📚

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Welcome to the 'Rather Dated' bookclub!
This month we are reading and discussing Edna O'Brien's 'The Country Girls'. Please add your thoughts when you are ready. All welcome!

Hi everyone! I enjoyed 'The Country Girls' very much. I have the other books in the trilogy and plan to read them soon.

There is a lot to say about this book. I thought it presented a very vivid picture of Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a man's world and women were in second place and expected to fulfill a functional and sexual role. Considering the women in the book, the two who stand out for being independent-minded are the woman who ran the greyhound hotel and Martha who used to assert herself and dress up at the bar, although she was very unhappy and not in control of her life.

There was a very unpleasant undercurrent of sexual exploitation running through the book and nearly every man seemed to be a predator including the sophisticated Mr. Gentleman. It was grim how he started to groom Cait by treating her and making her feel special as a vulnerable young girl.

I thought that the relationship between the two girls, the country girls, was fascinating, how the two of them had affection for each other but were also rivals. Their relationship is at the core of the story, much like the two girls in Elena Ferrante's 'My Brilliant Friend'. The mean treatment of Cait by Baba was terrible at times. She was definitely a bad influence on Cait! The two of them were a pair, each one as reliant on the other.

I also loved Edna O'Brien's writing which was exquisite, particularly the passages when Cait describes the countryside around her home which she loves with all her heart. The juxtaposition of the pain and misery associated with her home with the love she has for her beautiful surroundings is very striking. Also, the humour in the story helps to alleviate some of the sadness. Baba, for all that she is a right devil, has many good one-liners.

An amazing book and I'm glad I read it.

I’m going to go against what I think will be the popular opinion here and say that I didn’t really enjoy it. In fact I would have stopped reading halfway through if I hadn’t been reading it for this thread.

I just found it rather dull, as nothing much really happened. What I found really annoying though was the lack of any insight into how Cait felt about anything. It felt very much like a lot of ‘this happened then that happened’ and we never get told how she felt about those events, or what impact the events had on her. For that reason I couldn’t understand at all what Cait saw in Baba. Baba was just consistently mean to Cait who just seemed to accept it. An example was when Cait went to the party at Baba’s house and Baba was very mean and told her to go away (can’t recall exact phrase as book has gone back to library) and Cait just went home and then it moved on to talking about Cait’s dad. Nothing about how Cait felt about what Baba had done, or why she continued to stay friends with her after that event.

The plot line with Mr Gentleman also just fizzled out. I was expecting that to have a much bigger impact on Cait’s life but he just dropped out of the picture when the girls moved to Dublin - and again we get no insight into how Cait actually felt about any of it.

I can see how this might have seemed shocking when it was first published, given the storyline of an older man grooming a young girl, but beyond that I really cannot see what all the fuss is about! I definitely won’t be going on to read the others in the trilogy.

I'm with you @ChessieFL - thought it was awful. I had such high expectations and found it v lacking. I am aware that it was published a long time ago but even taking that into consideration it was a great disappointment.

The author grew up less than twenty miles from my hometown and I first read The Country Girls when I was 18 in 1994. I adore this book and even though I’m a different generation to Edna O’Brien can relate so much to what was written in the book. I too, like so many others had the same Catholic education and moved to London at a very young age. Unlike Edna, I did return to live in Ireland. Being Irish I can completely understand why it was banned in Ireland when it was first released.

My mother grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Ireland. I can relate to what was written in the book from her experiences, particularly her schooldays. There were some kind nuns, but also some cruel ones, who were very handy with the stick. My mother came from a poor background. She had ten siblings and an an alcoholic father, so I related to Cait's story through my mother. She married young to get out of home. Her older sisters emigrated to London.

I also had nuns in school and remember them as elderly, cantankerous women, fussy and particular about decorum and modesty.

I think the book presents a vivid and accurate portrayal of the times.

I think Cait was in thrall to Mr. Gentleman. He was wealthy and cultured, a cut above everyone else. She was drawn to him too as an older man, as a type of father figure, I think.

I love this book and last read it about a year ago. I think I first read it in my teens and at the time I thought Mr Gentleman seemed wonderful, so sad with his nervy wife dragging him down, and I imagined him looking like Peter O'Toole in a long black coat, and I hoped he'd whisk Cait off to a new life of luxury.

Thank God I was a bit better at recognising pervy middle aged men in real life!

But yes I agree @FuzzyCaoraDhubh she was probably looking for a father figure.
Your DMs childhood must have been so hard, and really it's not so long ago.

@ChessieFL I think Caitlin didn't stand up to Baba because her abusive father had taught her to accept being treated badly as her lot in life. IIRC Baba tells her to "Be off, trash" at the party.

@3beesinmybonnet
thats just how I imagined him too when I first read this, sad eyes, long coat and yes, like Peter O’Toole. But re reading, he’s a horror! She was 14!

Same ish here - I read it at about 20, just after I had moved from NI to London for uni. It resonated on so many levels. Loved it, it really captures so much of the time and place.

Archbishop McQuaid and Charlie Haughey hated it, so that's another good reason to like the book :)

From Wikipedia below.

Really interesting to hear the mix of opinions here.

I first read The Country Girls many years ago, and I have read the rest in the trilogy but can’t recall much about them now - I'll probably go back to them. Anyway, I really loved the book second time round, despite having forgotten much of the finer detail. What stayed with me was an abiding sense of sadness - the sadness of Cait's parents, her defeated mother and bullying father; the tense relationship of Baba's parents; the awfulness of the convent school; the grim sexual harassment of young girls by so many of the men, which had been normalised as it was so common. And, of course, Cait's obsession with Mr Gentleman, which was pure grooming on his part, but for her was so obviously and painfully a desperation for someone to notice her and make her feel special in what was really a lonely and bleak existence for a young girl. That thread of melancholy flowed through the whole book.

However, O'Brien's writing was poetic and spare, and I admire her ability to evoke a mood and a scene in very few words; there was something very clear and luminous about it. She cleverly started out with quite childlike language at the start, when Cait was a young teen, and almost imperceptibly made the writing more mature so by the end the 'voice' of the narrator had grown up along with the character. Actually the simplicity of it reminded me in places of Barbara Comyns, where again nothing was examined or explained, it just happened.

I agree that Baba was horrible to her, but I felt that was very realistic - girls often have relationships that teeter between bullying and friendship, and Cait was so isolated, with so few resources to call on, that I could completely accept her needing to hold on to someone like Baba (and, importantly, her family) even if they treated her badly. Again realistically, I felt, by the end they’d grown into a true friendship.

So….definitely a win for me with this choice. Thanks @FuzzyCaoraDhubh!

I love your review @Terpsichore

Yes I agree - great review @Terpsichore - you've explained to me so many things I felt about this book, but couldn't put into words.

You've also made me realise the parallels between Cait's life and my own , though I was in England not Ireland. I may have recognised pervy middle aged men, but as a 15 Yr old trapped with my parents constant rowing, nobody taking any notice of me, I was easy prey for a 27 Yr old mature student who invited me to a party and kindly offered to let me stay in his room overnight. I was all set to go until my DM finally took a break from expecting me to be her unpaid therapist and put her foot down at the last minute.

Thank you @FuzzyCaoraDhubh for choosing this book, though I'm afraid I'll probably not be contributing much as I'm going on holiday.

I agree that is a great review @Terpsichore . I love Edna O’Brien and could read her till the cows come home, which is an appropriate metaphor I think. I read Girl with green eyes as a teen, and loved it. So The country girls feels like a prequel, and Girls in their married bliss (which I found terrible and unsparing) feels like an ending. I was sad to learn what happens to Cait, and also to Baba, who I loved despite her vileness to Cait, especially in The Country Girls. The men they married are monsters , but the genius of the writing is such that there are no simple answers: Cait and Baba are no picnics to be married to either. I agree there is a bedrock of sadness to all these books, eVen though at times there are flashes of humour. But Edna O’Brien can write sadness with such precision and beauty that you just want to go on reading. I don’t know Ireland at all, but the writing is so good that there is a wonderful sense of place. Rain, single men in bars and tea shops, lipstick tested on the back of your hand. The detail is exquisite. So interesting that Mr Gentleman is seen as a tragic hero, but reading the books in 2024, as an adult, you want to call Childline. As an interesting aside, my copy of The Country Girls (1966 edition) has a glorious photo of Edna O on the cover, my God she was gorgeous.

I overall enjoyed the book as it was a fairly quick read, you can definitely see the influence on later books set in Ireland about young girls growing up in a rural setting.

I thought Mr Gentleman was portrayed well, I read him very much as a groomer but as the story is told from the POV of Cait I can see why he would come across as charming to a younger reader. There were men in parts also trying to kiss or get the girls to sit on their knees as well throughout the book.

I think the friendship between Cait and Baba was realistic, they were kind of thrown together by being the only two going to that school and I had similar friendships in school.

As my library copy had the whole trilogy I ended up reading them and have come to the conclusion that the first book is the weakest. The last book is narrated in large parts by Baba who was alot of fun to read but blimey its sad.