Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story: elegant documentary is dazzled by the glamour of Irish author’s life

Close to the end of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, a documentary by Sinéad O’Shea, the writer and critic Andrew O’Hagan forms an assessment of O’Brien’s work. Her strength, he tells us, came from her ability “to embrace ambiguity, to see all around her”. He is referring specifically to her 1994 novel about the Troubles House of Splendid Isolation, but he could be talking about any of her books, including her scandalous debut The Country Girls. The Country Girls was released in Ireland in 1960, when the Catholic Church were deeply entrenched in Irish life and women’s secondary place to men was enshrined in the constitution. Into this suffocating place breezed O’Brien, defiant, glamorous, sexy, a new kind of Irishwoman and, most crucially, a new kind of novelist.

Edna lived a hugely glamorous life, and part of the problem in this otherwise reverential and elegant documentary is that the discussion of her life is outsized in relation to her work. Yet, how could you resist? O’Brien was the last of a dying breed: the celebrity literary novelist. There were appearances on Question Time where she seemingly played a heightened version of herself (her wit was sharp and self-protective; she made the joke before anyone else could). She partied with Jackie Kennedy. Both Richard Burton and Marlon Brando made passes at her (Burton after reading Shakespeare aloud, of course). 

Her allure was self-evident – she was both put-together and vulnerable; her talent made her otherworldly. However, as she was celebrated in London – and in America admired by heavy-hitters such as John Updike and Philip Roth – in Ireland, Archbishop McQuaid and then justice minister Charlie Haughey plotted her professional demise. O’Brien’s books didn’t uphold family values, whatever that means. The columnist Kevin Myers wrote in a newspaper that he would “stick a hatchet in her head”. The sheer amount of misogyny she experienced was bottomless. Her conf idence and talent made O’Brien both a prize and a threat. As the novelist Anne Enright puts it, “Misogyny is just envy with extra dick.”

Still, it might have been her first marriage to the writer Ernest Gébler that gifted O’Brien the tenacity that remained with her throughout her life. Ernest was much older and much more experienced than the young O’Brien, who was only in her early twenties when she met him. Her parents disapproved of the union and demonstrated that disapproval by bringing round the parish priest. Perhaps, they were right. Gébler published his first book The Plymouth Adventure in 1950 and it was later made into a film. Clearly, there was room for only one creative in the family. When O’Brien published The Country Girls he claimed credit for her success and took her publisher’s cheques. In Blue Road, O’Brien’s original diaries are produced and, in a moment that would seem too heavyhanded if it appeared in fiction, we are shown that Gébler corrected them in red pen: forming his own appraisals of events, obscuring her thoughts. 

Together, they had two sons, Sasha, an architect, and Carlo, a writer, who agree that once their mother left their father they had a much happier, more peaceful childhood. Men kept getting in O’Brien’s way, but you could also argue that they made her the artist she was. The most poignant moment of the documentary comes from archive footage of O’Brien being interviewed with her parents. Her father – a man who by O’Brien’s admission was relentless and domineering, with a lifelong alcohol problem – sings an old ballad. O’Brien watches with a mix of shame and pride; her understanding of people, their capability for both violence and tenderness, comes directly from her early life. If in 1960s Ireland the family unit was considered sacred, then O’Brien knew at first hand how it could also be a place of secrets, quiet threats and horror. Family values indeed.

In her childhood, O’Brien seemed to have taken much solace in the County Clare landscape, an appreciation of physical beauty that later lent her work a powerful lyricism. She published over 30 books in her life. Her final novel, Girl (2019), set in Nigeria and about the Boko Haram abduction, proved she hadn’t lost her gifts or imaginative capacities even in her eighties. “Work, work, work,” her son Carlo repeats: work was her real passion. As an ode to O’Brien’s life, Blue Road is generous but frequently doesn’t move beyond the surface of this complicated woman. The documentary encompasses both her life and her death in July 2024 at the age of 93. A frail O’Brien appears and, astute as always, makes the final verdict: “I pursued the glitz for a while, but I always knew it wasn’t the real thing.”

► Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is in UK cinemas 18 April.