"Extremely nervous on this earth": Fairy tales and madness in Edna O'Brien's in the forest

This essay focuses on Edna O'Brien's 2002 novel based on a real-life triple. It considers this late work of O'Brien's fiction as engaging with a distinctly ecological concern for a lost sense of connectedness, both in relation to community life and to the natural world, in the increasingly suburbanised Ireland of the boom years around the turn of the millennium. The forest is an ambiguous space, the scene of lost innocence and of communion with the natural world and a symbolic repository for a dark and shameful history of bigotry and abuse. Drawing on the myth and fairy tale references, the essay shows that such myths and stories do not represent a lost idyll of innocence so much as deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes and an antipathy towards nature that not only thwarts the lives of women but also produces damaged and isolated male characters unable to develop a mature sense of self. The novel's violent events are a particularly dramatic manifestation of a long story of darkness: Of psychic, social and physical abuse, of individual and collective grief, both inflicted and inherited and of personal and historical madness.