The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien's first published novel, tells of innocence eventually lost. Narrated in the first person, it is the story of Caithleen, who at the beginning of the novel is a 14-year-old girl living in an Irish village, and at the end an 18-year-old in Dublin, abandoned by her first lover. The consciousness of a girl as she becomes a woman is not, however, just the subject of the book, it is also the effect of its style. Caithleen's half-childish, half-adult consciousness of things is enacted by the narrative.
The novel's very title implies an uncertainty about how adult she is. This is picked out when her "best friend" Baba proposes that they run away from their convent boarding school together and join a travelling show company. They will advertise themselves as "two female amateurs" who can act and sing.
"But we're not females, we're girls."
"We could pass as females."
"Females": a wonderfully callow word for what they think they might become. As often in the novel, innocence and experience contend with each other in the use of words. As we approach the novel's end, "Mr Gentleman" tells the 18-year-old Caithleen: "We're going to be together. I'm going to make love to you." The narrator says that she was "sad in some way, because the end of my girlhood was near". But then we hear that Mr Gentleman has begun to call her "his country girl" - to mean that she is now his mistress. Her innocence, of course, was just what he wanted.
Caithleen's "girlhood" is in the manner as well as the matter of the narrative. O'Brien has found a style that matches her character's recalled experiences. The narrative, for instance, admits girlish clichés as if unedited. "She was the best Mama in the world ... I was everything in the world to her, everything." It avoids retrospective understanding and simply arranges the particularities of her recollection. So Caithleen remembers the smell of Baba's soap, and this sets her off. "The soap and the neat bands of sticking-plaster, and the cute, cute smile; and the face dimpled and soft and just the right plumpness - for these things I could have killed her." The novel uses its own extraordinary version of what is usually called free indirect style, where a narrative adopts the sentiments and the vocabulary of the character. In O'Brien's version, a narrator who must, logically speaking, be the older and wiser Caithleen reinhabits her younger self and uses a style that replicates her youthful perceptions and misunderstandings.
Even the slow consciousness of sexuality is only half-stated. On her return from her first term at convent boarding school, Caithleen admires her newly plump legs in newly acquired nylon stockings. "I was grown up." Then she notices Mr Gentleman noticing her legs too: "his eyes dwelt on them for a while as if he were planning something in his mind." She knows and does not know his intentions, and we understand this not because we are told, but because the narrative reports signs without interpreting them. Mr Gentleman arrives at her door one day to offer her a lift to Limerick in his car. "He was wearing a black nap-coat and his face looked petrified." Two bits of information are given with equal matter-of-factness, and his fearfulness is caught with a schoolgirl cliché. When we infer that it shows his consciousness that he is going down the dangerous path of possible, eventual seduction, we cannot know if Caithleen understands this too. But she understands something. It is snowing, and "I knew that before the flakes began to show on the front bonnet Mr Gentleman was going to say that he loved me". And so he does.
She is often enough, in her own word, "foolish", not grasping adult desires. Jack Holland, who has for a long while been meeting her and writing to her, asks her if she has caught the "full implication" of his letters. "'What implication?' I asked, foolishly. So very foolishly." How much she discerns is not clear, but she does have discernment. Mr Gentleman's car pulls up alongside her while she is walking through the local village, and she asks him if he is going somewhere. "'Yes, I came over for petrol,' he said. It was a lie." It is not just the narrator who knows this; the teenage Caithleen knows it. The narrative re-enacts what were her thoughts, her immediate perceptions. Equally, though the narrator, naturally, grows no older through the novel, her narrative gives the sense of her younger self growing older. In her conversations with Mr Gentleman, her innocence begins to seem willed, even wry.
"'Are you my father?' I asked wistfully, because it was nice playing make-believe with Mr Gentleman."
Conscious innocence: it is a contradiction in terms, but it is also a narrative effect that seems brilliantly true to the strange state between childhood and adulthood.
· John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Edna O'Brien for a discussion on Thursday April 10 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Doors open at 6.30pm and entry costs £8. To reserve a ticket email book.club@theguardian.com or phone 020 7886 9281.
