SOURCE: "Saved from Drowning," in New York Times Book Review, May 25. 1997, p. 11.

In the following review, Mantel offers a favorable assessment of Down by the River, but faults O'Brien for what she perceives as overly pedantic, elaborate prose and a tendency to exhaustively reiterate issues.

Out in the country things get very murky," says Mary, the protagonist of Down by the River, Edna O'Brien's forlorn, unsparing and consciously exquisite novel of rural despair. Ireland is Ms. O'Brien's mother country, and mothers, as we know, are often capricious, often rejecting, often unwilling to mother at all. Mary is about to be a mother and unwilling to be so: because she is not quite 14 years old, and because the baby is the product of incest with her father.

Mary's own mother has died a premature and painful death; the child has nowhere to turn. She is unable to tell anyone...