Exploited mothers in Saints and Sinners

Sinners and sinned against would possibly be a more appropriate title for Edna O'Brien's new book, a collection of 11 short stories about her native Ireland. With a couple of exceptions, the tales are dark, uncompromising and hard-hitting.

The few saints who appear alongside the (male) philanderers, drunks and murderers in the book are put upon, exploited, and are always women - or, more specifically, mothers.

Childhood, with mothers at its epicentre, is the seed for all O'Brien's writing (and has been since her first novel, The Country Girls, exploded into the world in 1960) - every adult's behaviour is shaped by their experience as a child and their relationship with their mother.

It is, of course, the mothers who bring babies into the world all stained with original sin, making them the greatest sinners of all who must spend a lifetime repenting, grafting, self-sacrificing.

From those extraordinary women come extraordinary tales. So we have Shovel Kings, the first story in Saints And Sinners, ostensibly about a man, Rafferty, but with a mother at its core. Rafferty is an alcoholic navvy who came to London to dig roads. "Exile is in the mind and there is no cure for that," laments Rafferty who is so sick with love for his mother and the Ireland of his childhood that he cannot go home until long after her death - he believes, at the hands of his father. But without her nothing is the same and so he returns, picking up his pitiful hobo life in the Irish pubs of Camden.

In Sinners, Delia is an embittered B&B owner and widowed mother of five whose children never visit. Joy and lust having long been repressed, Delia is enthralled and ashamed when three guests challenge her stifled emotions with their blatant sexuality and carnal desires. On the surface she hates them for their immoral ways but in truth she hates them for forcing her to confront her narrow, loveless life.

Critics have often (wrongly) accused O'Brien of wallowing in a stylised Ireland of the mid-20th century, full of peat bogs, milk churns and whiskey, but Saints and Sinners proves yet again that she is ahead of the curve. In the exquisitely written Inner Cowboy, O'Brien shows how wealth and greed will fill the vacuum left by religion - with disastrous consequences. In the heartbreaking Send My Roots Rain,
a spinster librarian bows to the continuation of her miserable, lonely existence amid the ostentatious interior of a Dublin hotel where she is stood up by a poet. Surrounded, as she says, by "the rich who go to lunch in their helicopters".

On finishing this book, O'Brien, now 80, left London for Ireland to resume work on her memoirs. So much of her life is mirrored in Saints and Sinners that this book is all O'Brien fans need. For now.