Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story
Directed by Sinéad O’Shea

ONE of Ireland’s most important 20th-century novelists and a woman of verve, intelligence and wit, Edna O’Brien is memorialised fittingly in Sinead O’Shea’s beautifully crafted documentary.

It is perhaps only in retrospect that one realises what a phenomenal woman Edna O’Brien was, not only as a writer but as an early feminist and vibrant personality.

O’Shea really brings out her personality and charisma. While she was not a political writer with a capital “P,” she shone a keen light on personal relationships, shaped by a world in which women were second-class citizens and men ruled the roost.

O’Shea charts her life, growing up in rural Ireland, with a violent father, a loving but cowed mother and the ubiquitous oppression of the hegemonic Catholic Church.

She yearns for the freedom to express herself, to write and experience the world outside the confines of her claustrophobic rural backwater, even though that background is what would come to characterise her prose and continue to inspire her.

In later life, she tackled more overtly political subjects like the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the war in Bosnia.  

Her first husband — the Irish writer of Czech background Ernest Gebler — was a socialist (O’Brien calls him a communist), had an irresistible aura of cosmopolitan intellectualism about him and a whiff of glamour, as a Hollywood script writer. In his personal life, though, he was a vindictive authoritarian, poisoned by envy at his wife’s early success as a writer in her own right.

The film follows O’Brien’s escape to London, her meteoric literary success, and her books snapped up by film producers. There she leads a tumultuous life, diving headlong into the hedonism of the ’60s and ’70s.

Her salon parties were attended by the greats of the film and theatre world, from Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and Robert Mitcham to Shirley MacLaine, Judy Garland and Laurence Olivier.  

O’Shea’s film interweaves clips from those years, from home-made 8mm film to TV interviews, conversations with her two sons and other writers and critics who all help illuminate her writing and life. Excerpts from her diary are read by Jessie Buckley.

The film includes an extended interview with the author herself just before her death at the age of 93. She still retains a dignity and reflectiveness, her natural prose-poetry never deserting her.

An engaging, insightful and moving film.