Edna O'Brien: Stranger than fiction

Ever since her first novel, Edna O'Brien has been cast as both villain and saint in her native Ireland. Now her latest work has rekindled the old animosities. She talks to Peter Stanford

She sees things before they're ready to be seen and she writes about them," says Edna O'Brien's nephew, Michael Blake, halfway through the BBC documentary on the controversy surrounding her new novel, In the Forest. "That's what makes her unpopular."

He is not so much paying homage to her mystical qualities – though there is a touch of that in the film, with the still ethereally beautiful O'Brien wandering through a wood, a velvet scarf round her head in the manner of the Virgin Mary – but stating a fact. In her homeland of Ireland – she was born in County Clare – O'Brien is one of those people about whom everyone has an opinion, and many of them are negative.

"I don't see English authors being chastised publicly," laments O'Brien, who splits her time between a welcoming but scruffy book-lined terraced house in Knightsbridge and a home, designed by her architect son, in Co Donegal. "Not that I wish them to be. Yet in Ireland, I am attacked on grounds of morality. It is a little intemperate. There is a line of Yeats's: "Out of Ireland have we come/Great hatred, little room..." Little room, that's it. There is a pseudo-literary clique in Dublin that would resent one just for being the way one is."

The antipathy to her in Ireland, however, is much wider. It all began back in 1960 with her debut novel, The Country Girls. Its portrait of the repression and hypocrisy in Catholic Ireland so outraged many – including her own parents – that it was banned and even burned. For others, though, she was a prophet, the first writer with the courage to speak out in such terms about a moral climate that was destroying lives, especially those of young Irish women. The book was a landmark in the battle for a modern, secular Ireland that has, in the cities at least, now all but been won. So, logically, she should now be canonised for her foresight, but there is no logic in Ireland when it comes to Edna O'Brien.

In the Forest, her latest novel, has rekindled the old animosities and these are as much the subject of the Omnibus film as the book itself. Indeed, archive footage of the flame-haired O'Brien's own ordeal by fire in the 1960s is played over readings from In the Forest, linking one of the novel's central characters, Eily Ryan, a young, red-haired, free-spirit whose life was a cause of scandal for her more conservative neighbours, with O'Brien herself. The connection is complicated because the novel itself is based on a triple murder in April 1994. Eily Ryan is O'Brien's take on Imelda Riney, 29, who, along with her three-year-old son Liam and a priest, was killed by a mentally ill local man in Cregg Wood, four miles from where O'Brien grew up in the village of Tuamgraney.

In the Forest has topped the Irish best-sellers chart for weeks and won her lavish praise from critics there, in Britain and in the States. Harold Pinter has lauded it as "a savage portrait of desolation and rage, brilliantly told, truly shocking". Yet it has also been viciously decried by some influential commentators in Ireland as exploitative of the victims, insensitive to their families' grief, and "a fiction too far". "I'm going to Dublin next week to appear on The Late Late Show," O'Brien says, "and I would like to ask the people in the studio, and those down the country as we say, to tell me, without screaming at me, to tell me calmly what my crime is and I will listen. There is no crime. I have not committed a crime. It's an attitude and it's about me and not my work. I don't want to sound like the most persecuted creature, but I am attacked more than any other Irish writer."

Anyone who has read the novel – and several of her most vociferous critics clearly haven't – will share her bewilderment at quite what it is that she has done wrong. This is no sensational account. There is no prurience. The moment of death of Riney/Ryan is not described. The book is not based on interviews with the families, whom O'Brien did not seek out. She is an internationally renowned writer, who works in her imagination and who has an extraordinary command of and reverence for language, not some tabloid hack putting together a lurid tale from the press cuttings. She has tried to understand what happened, not exploit it, tried to move beyond the crude demonisation of the real-life killer, Brendan O'Donnell (Michen O'Kane in the novel) to find out why and how.

"In the film," she says, "they use just one clip of a live radio programme I did before an audience in Dublin. I'd say that that audience was split 50-50, which, for me in Ireland, is progress. But the clip they used is where the interviewer asks me, 'Did you write it for money?'. They wouldn't ask any other writer that. If that is all they can come up with as my 'crime', then they are judging this book on wobbly grounds."

We are sitting on a very small, formal sofa in the upstairs sitting-room of O'Brien's London home. "Go on up there," she says when I arrive. "Its the only presentable room in the house." It may be my English reserve, or the gruesome nature of the crimes we are discussing, but I find it hard to relax. Mostly, it's O'Brien herself. When she speaks about her work, she does so with such passion – "writing bleeds you body and soul and mind. I find it so hard" – and with such vulnerability that I alternate between feeling utterly shallow and wanting to hug her. There is a moment in the film when her extraordinary voice, low and slow, breaks as she stands next to the graves of Imelda and Liam Riney, and you know for sure that this is entirely spontaneous and utterly heartfelt and you want to weep, too.

"In writing the book, I had already lived with this story for two and half years. It was gruelling. If you write about madness, you have to go into the mad chamber. Then, to go back and do a film was almost doubly hard. Part of it was the renewal of the emotions, and part of it was the reluctance of local people to talk to us. It's so raw and it confronts things that people want to pretend don't exist. Keep the doors closed, keep the minds closed, keep the gates closed."

We get back to what her nephew says of her in the film. Does she agree with him? She pauses. "I don't set out to write controversial or daring things, but it is unwise to bury things. Repression, denial is just as pathological as anything I'm trying to do. Its not the way to develop, to mature." She applies this both to individuals and to societies, but particularly Irish society.

Has the latest controversy not persuaded her to break with the past and look further afield than Ireland for her next novel? She laughs at the very thought. "The thing about Ireland is that I couldn't do without it. Maybe if the Irish were asked, though, they would say that they could do without me."

'Murder in the Forest' is on BBC 2 on 1 June. 'In the Forest' is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Edna O'Brien talks about the book at the National Theatre tomorrow at 7.15pm (020-7452 3000)