A Pagan Place was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1970, and it represents O’Brien’s most ambitious departure from conventional realism. The novel narrates an Irish country childhood — a girl growing up in a landscape of fields, rivers, bogs, and the ever-present authority of the Church — entirely in the second person: “You went to school. You sat next to Lizzie. You watched the priest.” This grammatical choice, sustained for the entire novel, creates an extraordinary effect: the reader is simultaneously inside the experience and watching it from a distance, as if the narrator cannot bear to say “I” about events too painful for direct confession.
The subject matter is familiar from O’Brien’s earlier work — the alcoholic father, the long-suffering mother, the oppressive Church, the awakening of sexual consciousness — but the second-person narration transforms it. Events that might seem melodramatic in conventional first or third person become strange and compelling: a girl’s first menstruation, her confused attraction to a local priest, her father’s violence, her mother’s complicity. The flatness of the “you” voice — detached, reportorial, without commentary — makes the horror of these experiences more, not less, intense.
The title refers to the pre-Christian Ireland that lies beneath the Catholic surface — the holy wells, the fairy forts, the rituals of the natural world that persist in rural life despite centuries of Christian overlay. O’Brien suggests that this pagan layer is more honest about human nature than the Christianity that replaced it: the pagan place acknowledges desire, violence, and the body in ways that Catholic Ireland cannot.
The novel ends with the girl entering a convent — a conclusion that earlier readers found puzzling but that makes psychological sense: having been unable to reconcile the demands of the body with the prohibitions of the Church, the girl chooses the Church’s most extreme form of renunciation. It is not a victory but a capitulation, and O’Brien presents it without judgment, allowing the reader to feel both the relief and the tragedy of the choice.
A Pagan Place was adapted as a play by O’Brien herself and produced at the Royal Court Theatre in 1972. The novel has gained in reputation over the decades as readers have recognized its formal daring and its psychological depth.
Collecting A Pagan Place
First edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- American first (Knopf): $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$10