I first encountered Edna O’Brien in an Irish Literature class in college, through her novel The House of Splendid Isolation. Out of all the wonderful works I read in class, that book stayed with me the longest. While making the reader uncomfortable by putting a human face on a character who has committed atrocities is nothing new, at the time it stood out to me. I’m sure I had read unlikeable and probably despicable characters before, but maybe because I had a strange interest in the so-called Irish “Troubles” as a kid in the 1990s, The House of Splendid Isolation gave me the memorable and uncomfortable experience of connecting with McGreevy, an IRA terrorist.
It was hard then not to compare The House of Splendid Isolation and The Little Red Chairs when I was reading it. In a way, both books share the same premise: an awful criminal comes to a small Irish town and has a profound effect on one woman. In The House of Splendid Isolation, it’s terrorist McGreevy holing up in the once great house with the elderly Josie O’Meara as his captive. In The Little Red Chairs, it’s Dr. Vlad Dragan, a Serbian war criminal who set himself up as a massage therapist and holistic healer who wins over the town of Cloonoila and particularly, Fidelma McBride. Dragan’s character is based on Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb war criminal convicted of genocide who avoided capture for many years by posing as a new age health guru.
At first, the town is wary of Dr. Dragan, and the local priests and nun balk at his suggestion that he is a sex therapist. But soon everyone is taken with his dashing presence, his healing massage, and his mysterious demeanor. His helps the elderly and wins over the local book group. In an ominous passage where nothing untoward actually happens—O’Brien just instills you with a sense of dread that it will happen—Dragan takes school children on a hike to learn about edible and poisonous mushrooms. Finally, because her husband is not able to give her a child, Fidelma begins an affair with Dragan, and she becomes pregnant.
I read this first third of the book breathlessly and late into the night. The pacing keeps you reading. You know long before the other characters that Dragan is a war criminal, and you’re waiting for them to find out. It felt like it could come at any time, and when it finally does, it’s surprising in the banality and procedural nature of his arrest. Then there is poor pregnant Fidelma, who is kidnapped and brutalised by Dragan’s friends. She loses the baby.
The violence against Fidelma should not have been so surprising. As I wrote about in my review of Sara Novic’s Girl at War last year, this was a war where commanders and generals ordered rape and violence against women and girls. But I suppose I had steeled myself to read about it within the greater context of genocide—not easy at any times to stomach—and not in the peaceful idyll of Cloonoila. O’Brien lulled me into complacency as much as her fictional inhabitants. Fidelma’s rape and loss is the turning point of the book. The town of Cloonoila can no longer ignore Dragan; they must face who they have been harboring.
The next two thirds of the book follow Fidelma as she leaves Ireland, not being able to stand her own betrayal and victimhood, for London. Homeless and jobless, she’s taken in by social workers who help her find jobs and eventually encourage her to attend a support group for refugees. This part of the book slowed me down a little bit. It seemed to me that O’Brien was trying to say that Fidelma’s experience of losing a child was a consequence of war, even if it was a more removed effect of war, and that it was similar experience to those surviving the siege of Sarajevo. I don’t know if it totally works, but I did think about it a lot. I know that trauma is not a competition, but you feel the frustration of other characters in the support group at Fidelma’s presence.
It’s in this section, and the next about Dragan’s war crimes trial at The Hague, where the full weight of his atrocities descends. Fidelma tries to visit him, I think as an attempt to see if there is humanity in him, to convince herself that she is not also a monster. He is terrifying and denies all wrongdoing, while defending his actions and the rightness of “ethnic cleansing” and genocide.
It’s in the last chapter entitled “Home,” that I think Fidelma finally is able to reconcile what happened between her and Dragan, and the experiences of the other women in the refugee support group. She is a refugee in some ways, but not others. Remembering back to the trial she narrates,
“What brings peace. What brings certainty.
I asked the interpreter in The Hague to ask the Mothers of Srebrenica [a massacre of over 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks by Serb forces in the Bosnia War] and they listened attentively and then one spoke—A bone, she said. To find the smallest piece of bone of one of her children, or better still to find the bones of each of her three children.”
To those mothers, they want a bone to bring them peace, some evidence that their children lived once, and Fidelma in her way can empathize with her loss. She has no bones of her child either.
For me, the mother wishing for only one bone of her murdered child was perhaps the most heartbreaking part of the book. This is a loss that I’ve never experienced and that I hope to never experience. It’s interesting then that O’Brien chooses not to explain the title of the book anywhere within the novel’s text. The little red chairs of the title refer to a memorial displayed in 2012 called the Sarajevo Red Line, which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo and the memory of the 11,541 people who were killed. 11,541 chairs were placed in 825 rows and ran 800 meters down one of the main streets of the city. 643 of those red chairs were child-sized, representing the children who died in the siege.
The pictures of the memorial are haunting. Looking from above, it’s a solid red line of chairs and the small size of those 643 are enough to break your heart.
The Little Red Chairs is about the cost of genocide and war even to those not directly involved. O’Brien asks the reader to live with the discomfort of knowing evil before her characters do and then having to face it. While it doesn’t always work, O’Brien asks us to consider the far-reaching effects of war and engage with the very human face of a monster. Yes, Dragan was “just doing his job”—a job which happened to be systematic rape and genocide—and yet could still create life. What a world we live in.
