What A Lot Of Words

A Review of the documentary film 'The Blue Road; A life of Edna O'Brien' 

Irish writer Edna O'Brien (1930 - 2024) must have been immensely self possessed to not just live to the age of ninety three, after writing thirty four books, and having written much more material in every other genre except children's books besides over sixty years, but with what remained of her energy marshalled the materials for a documentary film of her life, in which she was the key interviewee.   

I did not realise how little I knew about her until I watched the film, which had the most basic of pleasures attached to it; it was very well edited. Reflecting on watching the documentary, it was unsurprising that I knew so little when she publishing her first best selling novel before I was even thought of. But that I was in a cinema with an audience mostly full of retired women who had probably followed her work all their adult lives should have been a clue to me. They were not downloading the documentary to screens for them to watch it at home. They were choosing the 'old school' way of watching films, being part of a cinema audience-something I wish I had grown up with a lot more if the films that were available for me to watch had been as well made as this film.     

Many aspects of the documentary spoke to me, her voice was one major surprise. Even when she was being filmed for being interviewed in her nineties, when she was obviously a composed but diminished figure. Her diction made me listen. Aside from the framing interviews, there were diary entries read out, and the words highlighted on the screen as they were read, quotes from her books were treated the same way. What people older than me might have predicted, but I didn't, was how much she sparkled in her many television interviews, on chat shows and book programmes from 1960s through to the 1980s when the budget for television allowed for much more erudition. All the top BBC male interviewers interviewed her, Cliff Michelmore, Melvyn Bragg, and Russell Harty, along with plenty of interviewers from the RTE archive where the interviewers sounded less posh.  What I liked was how easily in interviews she could be both posh and terse about how she did like men, and thought women should be able to like men, but she was not at all appreciative of typical male ideas about marriage.

Some footage was shot to dramatize parts of her books, and life, but it all filmed sensitively so that it blended smoothly with the diary and book readings, and the rare images of her parents and where she grew up. I liked her dress sense in the interviews, she chose incredibly dramatically cut and brightly patterned dresses, in a way that the women writers like Anne Enright who commented on Edna O'Brien's life in 2024 could not match. 

She died last July, 2024, and was buried in an off-white wicker coffin on Holy Island. One of her comments late in the film was 'I don't own my own house. I don't have a car....   ...but I do own my own island burial plot'. What a lot of well chosen words indeed.