“The O’Briens” by Peter Beherns, Pantheon Press , March
2012, 384 pp.
By BRETT WARNKE
Disgorged from Irish coffin ships along
the St. Lawrence during the Great Starvation, young immigrants fell upon Canada
and the New World.
Peter Behrens new novel, The
O’Briens, follows four generations of an Irish-Canadian family who seem to
forget this history as quickly as they take part in it. Joe, the novel’s surly and indefatigable
protagonist eschews any connection to the Emerald Isle. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about Ireland,” he
admits to his brother, Grattan, who brims with unrealized illusions of aiding
the struggling republic after World War I.
The novel follows the deep tracks of the
O’Briens from their early frontier life in the logged and cleared Canadian
countryside, “the breadbasket of the British Empire.” Beherns then takes the reader from the Boer
War to the Beatles. Beherns is
interested in how a family is shaped by its context. But he is also concerned with the loneliness,
or at least the aloneness of the O’Briens.
The family’s patriarch is buried in a solitary undated grave and the
epistolary sections of the novel (mostly set during the wars) reveal quaking
isolation and anxiety. “Everyone needs a
home, Mr. O’Brien.” To which Grattan
O’Brien admitted, “Do they? I think I
carry my home inside my head.”
Joe O’Brien is the self-made head
of the family. And while he is a
tireless worker, he is also a muted self-medicating union-buster whose intermittent
booze-guzzles in New York nearly destroy his marriage. Beherns, while so often excellent, can slip
into weaker lines: “the city had a
killer side.”
Yet, Beherns beautifully captures
the blinkered isolationism and purposeful neglect in those months before the
Second World War: “People in other
cities were being terrorized, but it had not mattered as much as a new pair of
shoes.” Also, the passing of glory is brilliantly
explored as soldiers fight and die while their forsaken monuments stare blankly
ahead, forgotten by a busy public.
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