In the Forest was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2002, and it is O’Brien’s darkest and most controversial novel. The book is based on the murders committed by Brendan O’Donnell in County Clare in 1994 — O’Donnell kidnapped and killed Imelda Riney, her three-year-old son Liam, and Father Joe Walsh, hiding their bodies in the forest near Cregg. O’Brien, who grew up in the same part of Clare, transformed the case into fiction, renaming the characters but staying close to the facts.
The novel follows Michen O’Kane (based on O’Donnell) from his damaged childhood — mother dead young, father absent, years in brutal institutional care — through his release into a community that recognizes the danger he poses but does nothing effective to prevent it. O’Brien’s achievement is to make Michen comprehensible without making him sympathetic: she traces the logic of his violence back to the violence done to him, not to excuse it but to show how the chain of damage works. The Ireland of the novel is a place where vulnerable children are warehoused in institutions, where mental illness is stigmatized and ignored, and where the community’s preference for looking the other way has lethal consequences.
The novel caused a furor in Clare. The Riney family objected to the fictionalization of their tragedy, and some Irish critics accused O’Brien of exploitation. Others defended the novel as a necessary reckoning with the failures of Irish society — the industrial schools, the Magdalene laundries, the culture of silence — that had produced men like O’Donnell. The controversy echoed the response to O’Brien’s earliest novels: once again, she was telling truths about Ireland that Ireland preferred not to hear.
The prose is among O’Brien’s most controlled and beautiful. The forest itself becomes a character — ancient, dark, indifferent — and O’Brien uses the landscape of Clare with the specificity of a native, grounding the horror in a world of real trees, real fields, real weather. The contrast between the beauty of the setting and the ugliness of what happens there is the novel’s central irony.
Collecting In the Forest
First edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2002): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- American first (Houghton Mifflin): $10–$25
- Later editions: $5–$10