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Casualties Of Peace
Librarian note: alternate-cover edition of 9780140028751.
Willa had loved, Had been mangled by love, Wrung dry enought to crack. Her desperation mirrored in the World of glass she built to fileter out the threat of feeling, With Tom and Patsy, to secure a kind of Peace.
Willa had loved, Had been mangled by love, Wrung dry enought to crack. Her desperation mirrored in the World of glass she built to fileter out the threat of feeling, With Tom and Patsy, to secure a kind of Peace.
141 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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133 people want to read
About the author
Edna O'Brien
112 books1,377 followersEdna O’Brien was an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories. She has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. She was the 2011 recipient of the Frank O’Connor Prize, awarded for her short story collection Saints and Sinners. She also received, among other honors, the Irish PEN Award for Literature, the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin, and a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Literary Academy. Her 1960 debut novel, The Country Girls, was banned in her native Ireland for its groundbreaking depictions of female sexuality. Notable works also include August Is a Wicked Month (1965), A Pagan Place (1970), Lantern Slides (1990), and The Light of Evening (2006). O’Brien lived in London until her death.
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April 8, 2019I feel like this needs to be set against the background of what was written in the sixties to give context to what felt flawed to me. Two of the characters, Patsy and Tom resonate as depressingly real, they are entirely believable. I did not find the others so. It was also alarming that O'Brien is willing to call an abusive man who murders Willa in a case of mistaken identity 'good'. Maybe bashing and raping one's wife was judged differently way back then. But surely not that differently.
Probably worth reading, it certainly shouldn't have been entirely forgotten, as is the case judging by the lack of attention on goodreads. I expect if another of hers fell my way I'd give it a whirl.
Probably worth reading, it certainly shouldn't have been entirely forgotten, as is the case judging by the lack of attention on goodreads. I expect if another of hers fell my way I'd give it a whirl.
August 28, 2024
The other morning I woke up to learn that Edna O'Brien had died at 93. That is a ripe old age. My mother died at 90. It takes a good long run at living to get to either age.
Casualties of Peace was her fifth novel. It opens with a nightmare that seems so real I did not get that it was a dream until Willa awoke. Edna O'Brien's books always grab me by the throat and never let go. Even as she writes about horrific things, the prose is beautiful, rich, and so alive.
I read this novel in under two days. Every character has longings, every longing is unfulfilled. You don't read Edna O'Brien to get happy. You read her to understand unfulfilled longing as something that is inherent in life. As children we are raised to strive for happiness. A dirty trick if you ask me.
I don't mean to sound dour or depressing. It is in the nature of people to want, to strive, to achieve. It is in the nature of some people to use force to get what they want, or deceit. It is in the nature of others to fall into depression, fear, or despair, when their longings are not met.
Willa has been abused by a man, physically and emotionally. Now she lets a man and his wife, Tom and Patsy, live in one of her rooms, he to take care of the property, she to take care of the house. In fact, she hopes they can protect her from further hurt. It all comes out by the end but the story is not straight forward. Thus it is a kind of mystery.
If you like stories that make you happy, hopeful, or contented, this is not one of those. It is one that creates empathy, that makes you want to protect people from each other and themselves.
Casualties of Peace was her fifth novel. It opens with a nightmare that seems so real I did not get that it was a dream until Willa awoke. Edna O'Brien's books always grab me by the throat and never let go. Even as she writes about horrific things, the prose is beautiful, rich, and so alive.
I read this novel in under two days. Every character has longings, every longing is unfulfilled. You don't read Edna O'Brien to get happy. You read her to understand unfulfilled longing as something that is inherent in life. As children we are raised to strive for happiness. A dirty trick if you ask me.
I don't mean to sound dour or depressing. It is in the nature of people to want, to strive, to achieve. It is in the nature of some people to use force to get what they want, or deceit. It is in the nature of others to fall into depression, fear, or despair, when their longings are not met.
Willa has been abused by a man, physically and emotionally. Now she lets a man and his wife, Tom and Patsy, live in one of her rooms, he to take care of the property, she to take care of the house. In fact, she hopes they can protect her from further hurt. It all comes out by the end but the story is not straight forward. Thus it is a kind of mystery.
If you like stories that make you happy, hopeful, or contented, this is not one of those. It is one that creates empathy, that makes you want to protect people from each other and themselves.
November 10, 2020
Casualties of Peace by Edna O’Brien is a short, sharp tale of love, betrayal, and violence. Willa is a damaged woman—fragile, fretful, timid, tense, and yet filled with a yearning for greater happiness. Patsy appears to be Willa’s live-in housekeeper—seemingly bold and brassy, yet simple-hearted and voluptuous and, like Willa, possessed of her own yearnings. Patsy’s marriage to Tom (who also lives in Willa’s house) is in tatters. In a way, Willa and Patsy are soulmates: they have both experienced regret and are seeking an elusive, fulfillment of femininity.
Willa is having a tenuous affair with Auro, a man already in a strange relationship with Beryl. The affair is tenuous in that desire is in conflict with diffidence, courage at odds with cowardice. Willa exhibits all the behavior of a previous unsatisfactory relationship, one with darker dimensions she cannot, or will not talk about. Patsy, too, is having an affair with Ron, a married man with children.
Things come to boiling point when Patsy decides to leave Tom, ending her marriage with no more than a farewell note. Tom is wounded and angry, but is clueless about what to do next. He still loiters at Willa’s, although she has given him an ultimatum to vacate her house while she is away for a day. In fact, she has tremblingly agreed to spend a night with Auro, but not at her house. Meanwhile, since Patsy incurred a slight delay in arrangements with Ron, he impetuously calls everything off and mails back to her a bundle of her letters, which, naturally, fall into Tom’s hands. Tom’s anger is whipped up into a murderous rage.
Patsy, with nowhere else to go returns to Willa’s house, but having witnessed Tom’s dangerous temper, Willa intercepts Patsy and gives her enough money to find a hotel for the time being. Now that Tom is alone in the house, his imagination runs wild, not only with what Patsy and Ron have been up to, but also what his intentions are for Patsy—she is no stranger to his past physical abuse. After a night in Auro’s arms for Willa, and a pampering night for Patsy in a luxury hotel, both women are unknowingly homeward bound to an act of violence that goes horribly wrong. However, part of the outcome of this violence is revelation of the details of Willa’s past and the cause of her emotional damage.
Casualties of Peace is well-plotted and the characters are grittily real. O’Brien’s prose style has some unusual edges to it: sentences are fragmented; they leap off the page nervously, tangentially. Regular readers of O’Brien’s works may be accustomed to her style, but this reviewer, at any rate, found himself frequently re-reading previous lines to make sense of how the story is moving along. This is not a showstopper, for the book as a whole is entertaining and well worth the read.
Willa is having a tenuous affair with Auro, a man already in a strange relationship with Beryl. The affair is tenuous in that desire is in conflict with diffidence, courage at odds with cowardice. Willa exhibits all the behavior of a previous unsatisfactory relationship, one with darker dimensions she cannot, or will not talk about. Patsy, too, is having an affair with Ron, a married man with children.
Things come to boiling point when Patsy decides to leave Tom, ending her marriage with no more than a farewell note. Tom is wounded and angry, but is clueless about what to do next. He still loiters at Willa’s, although she has given him an ultimatum to vacate her house while she is away for a day. In fact, she has tremblingly agreed to spend a night with Auro, but not at her house. Meanwhile, since Patsy incurred a slight delay in arrangements with Ron, he impetuously calls everything off and mails back to her a bundle of her letters, which, naturally, fall into Tom’s hands. Tom’s anger is whipped up into a murderous rage.
Patsy, with nowhere else to go returns to Willa’s house, but having witnessed Tom’s dangerous temper, Willa intercepts Patsy and gives her enough money to find a hotel for the time being. Now that Tom is alone in the house, his imagination runs wild, not only with what Patsy and Ron have been up to, but also what his intentions are for Patsy—she is no stranger to his past physical abuse. After a night in Auro’s arms for Willa, and a pampering night for Patsy in a luxury hotel, both women are unknowingly homeward bound to an act of violence that goes horribly wrong. However, part of the outcome of this violence is revelation of the details of Willa’s past and the cause of her emotional damage.
Casualties of Peace is well-plotted and the characters are grittily real. O’Brien’s prose style has some unusual edges to it: sentences are fragmented; they leap off the page nervously, tangentially. Regular readers of O’Brien’s works may be accustomed to her style, but this reviewer, at any rate, found himself frequently re-reading previous lines to make sense of how the story is moving along. This is not a showstopper, for the book as a whole is entertaining and well worth the read.
July 9, 2019
From the first page, my reaction to this book was, "Wow, this person can write!" It's just an amazing display of, not only facility with language, but the communication of feeling and the tragedies of mundane existence. The little sacrifices that people live with everyday that turn out to have startling and violently unseen consequences. The secret pain that gets in the way of desire and connection. The decisions to live and love and how they're thwarted. Just a beautiful and moving example of how to attend to the difficulty of life and the nearness of death.
February 16, 2019
dna O’Brien is such a familiar name – and yet I have only read about five of her novels. In 2015 I read her most recent novel The Little Red Chairs – a searingly powerful book. Casualties of Peace is a much earlier novel, and for the most part I really enjoyed it.
“Why did her body desert her so? Why had she let doom take charge of her? She lay back and stretched to try and unwind the coil of pain in her stomach.”
It is a novel that is fairly bleak, from the moment I started it I had a bad feeling about how this would go. There are, I should warn future readers, some fairly unpleasant scenes of domestic violence.
Set in the London of the 1960s, the novel centres on Willa, Patsy and Tom. Willa is fragile, a dreamer and still recovering from a failed love affair. She is an innocent, embarking on a relationship with a married Jamaican man Auro. While she longs for him, fantasising about him when he isn’t with her – she seems stuck – unable to move forward with the next stage of their relationship.
Patsy and Tom live with Willa – providing basic housekeeping duties and companionship to the isolated, nervy Willa. Patsy and Tom are loud, passionate and seem odd companions to Willa, an artist in glass – herself, delicate and virginal bruised from her first experience of love. She wants to sleep with Auro, who seems to genuinely care for Willa, unaware perhaps of just how vulnerable she is. He, himself is unhappily married, and will soon be leaving London.
full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2018/...
“Why did her body desert her so? Why had she let doom take charge of her? She lay back and stretched to try and unwind the coil of pain in her stomach.”
It is a novel that is fairly bleak, from the moment I started it I had a bad feeling about how this would go. There are, I should warn future readers, some fairly unpleasant scenes of domestic violence.
Set in the London of the 1960s, the novel centres on Willa, Patsy and Tom. Willa is fragile, a dreamer and still recovering from a failed love affair. She is an innocent, embarking on a relationship with a married Jamaican man Auro. While she longs for him, fantasising about him when he isn’t with her – she seems stuck – unable to move forward with the next stage of their relationship.
Patsy and Tom live with Willa – providing basic housekeeping duties and companionship to the isolated, nervy Willa. Patsy and Tom are loud, passionate and seem odd companions to Willa, an artist in glass – herself, delicate and virginal bruised from her first experience of love. She wants to sleep with Auro, who seems to genuinely care for Willa, unaware perhaps of just how vulnerable she is. He, himself is unhappily married, and will soon be leaving London.
full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2018/...
November 13, 2010
Well this was a quare little book, the story of an emotionally bruised and battered young woman, an artist who works in glass. No coincidence that Willa's medium is as brittle and fragile as her emotional state. She shares a house (somewhere in Britain) with an Irish labourer and his wife—Tom and Patsy—who provide domestic services and security as well as some companionship in return for free rent. But all is not well in this self-created dysfunctional "family": Willa is having an "affair" (of sorts, as she's a technical virgin) with a married Jamaican fellow; Patsy is having an affair with ginger-headed Ron; and Tom is clue-less. How could it be well? On the verge of walking out of her marriage, Patsy's raunchy "love" missives to Ron are discovered, and all hell (aka Tom) breaks loose.
Written in the mid-'60s, after The Country Girls trilogy and August is a Wicked Month, the text, structure and plotting of the book are what may once have been called "experimental". While still exploring her early themes of female alienation and sexual repression, O'Brien's style in this slender volume reminded me of Elfrida Jelinek's work. Take that as a warning, if you will. I'm not sure if the book is still in print; I bought it at a second-hand shop on Fourth Avenue. The cover price of the Penguin paperback was 60p.
Written in the mid-'60s, after The Country Girls trilogy and August is a Wicked Month, the text, structure and plotting of the book are what may once have been called "experimental". While still exploring her early themes of female alienation and sexual repression, O'Brien's style in this slender volume reminded me of Elfrida Jelinek's work. Take that as a warning, if you will. I'm not sure if the book is still in print; I bought it at a second-hand shop on Fourth Avenue. The cover price of the Penguin paperback was 60p.
August 24, 2021
The book is a self-contained story about love and trauma, and how they change us in our everyday life. In fact, a lot of the time the distinction between the two was not very clear, which reflects the complex nature of powerful emotions and experiences. Hate is mixed with desire, love is mixed with fear and shame. This aspect of uncertainty, confusion, and incoherence is what I enjoyed most about the book, as it skillfully conveyed one of the most fundamental human experiences.
The central message that I took from the book was that we are (more than) the sum of our experiences. We carry our baggage, but with it we also carry the potential for working through it and becoming a better version of ourselves. It is up to us to facilitate this transformation.
Reading the book was, at times, difficult, as I struggled to get into the flow of the story. This might speak to the time and place the book was written more than it does to its quality, but it nevertheless affected my reading experience, as I believe it would for many others. I am also under the impression that the pacing was sometimes off, in a way that did not necessarily support the mood and message of the book.
The central message that I took from the book was that we are (more than) the sum of our experiences. We carry our baggage, but with it we also carry the potential for working through it and becoming a better version of ourselves. It is up to us to facilitate this transformation.
Reading the book was, at times, difficult, as I struggled to get into the flow of the story. This might speak to the time and place the book was written more than it does to its quality, but it nevertheless affected my reading experience, as I believe it would for many others. I am also under the impression that the pacing was sometimes off, in a way that did not necessarily support the mood and message of the book.
July 8, 2025
Frigidity, impotence, adultery, pregnancy, two women and four men, of the latter, three white and one black--you might well ask yourself, how could this short novel go wrong? Well, it doesn't go totally wrong, and for fans of O'Brien, like me, it is well worth the relatively short amount of time it takes to read, but in the end there is almost an aftertaste of misogyny that clings to the narrative, especially surrounding the fate of Willa and the ultimate ending of the Tom and Patsy story. It is as though the two central women characters spend the entire novel building up escape velocity from the orbit of men who are bad for them, only to be destroyed or held in check in the end. I felt both of them deserved a better fate, and maybe that was O'Brien's point. All in all, another depressing Irish novel, though this one takes place almost entirely in jolly ole England.
May 26, 2023
This is closer to three and a half stars, but doesn't quite hold together enough to get to four. It's a novel about violence against women that is poorly described on the back cover of my edition as: "When the euphoria of Willa's first love faded, it is replaced by bitterness..." This is NOT AT ALL what this book is about. Instead, it's a novel of repressed trauma and a willingness on the part of the protagonist to seek love after a fearful time in her life. It's also about another character who despises women and finally finds his way toward showing it. Somehow the book gets away with a lot of weirdness by the utter beauty of its writing. I'm reading O'Brien's works in chronological order with a friend and we're excited to see how her subjects evolve over time.
January 29, 2024
A beautiful and horrific novel about the abuse women suffer at the hands of men. A sensitive glass artist is recovering from a brutal relationship with the help of her live-in helpers, who are going through their own increasingly violent ending. The novel is a bit hard to get into at first due to the minimum of introduction to the characters (both present and past), but this adds to the sense of the cycle of abuse. O’Connor’s language is especially poetic and dense in this novel and shows her at the height of her powers.
February 9, 2024
Very sad that this book is (to my knowledge) out of print as it is for the most part a really great example of O’Brien at her best. The last few chapters in particular are masterfully played out - to the point that I had to sit and finish the book in Highbury and Islington station as I just could not wait til after that evening’s pub trip to get to the end. It would undoubtably get five stars were it not for the fact that the opening exposition is rather confusing and drawn out.
March 20, 2025
This isn't a long read and if it was I probably would have given up. It is my first O'Brien novel so I had nothing to compare it to. A bit like Willa I guess, I hadn't a clue what was going on. There is something about the writing that is almost compulsive, enticing, gripping and tantalising. You've almost got a finger on what is happening.
We're generally much more aware nowadays than 60 years ago when it was written, though it all becomes clear in the end. Sort of.
We're generally much more aware nowadays than 60 years ago when it was written, though it all becomes clear in the end. Sort of.
August 20, 2021
Tense, edgy and ultimately shocking Casualties of Peace by Edna O'Brien is the story of ordinary lives dominated by extraordinary violence. Beautifully written and so well balanced, the every day domesticity is sharply observed as we witness the characters in all their glorious, mundane detail but with an undertow of fear.
August 5, 2023
3.5 stars, this was good but not amazing
August 14, 2023
It was a good read. Short, very descriptive yet straight to the point. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea. But after this, being my second book by Edna O'Brien, I want to read more of hers.
August 19, 2024
So glad to have discovered Edna O'Brien - poetically in the wake of her death
November 21, 2024
I'm going chronologically through all the Edna O'Brien novels and stories I have, leaving aside for now the Country Girls trilogy. Whereas August Is a Wicked Month depicted mostly random encounters that are nevertheless clear, Casualty leans more stream-of-consciousness, so that you have established relationships sketched murkily. Again, as with August, appreciation for the art, dismay at the trauma.
December 14, 2012
The thing I don't like about this book is the whole self-induced melancholy against backdrop of nothing, about ordinary life's up and down, of five uninteresting characters.
Mainly it's just some ordinary love affairs and emotional disturbance among five plain characters. Willa, a 26-year-old virgin (or older than that), is an isolated and lonely artist with fragile mental state. Patsy, Willa's housemate, is an active married female who is having affair with another man. Tom, Patsy's husband, is vulgar, violent and ... plain. The story started approaching its climax as Patsy decided to run away with another man. Besides some emotional tensions and conflicts among characters, there are not much but Willa's rambling about strange fables, fears, loneliness, nervousness, and her longing for a man. I found the story, dangling from a fragile frame, is cluelessly depressing and bleak.
However in the book some lines about characters' psychology do lose my emotional resonance sometimes. After all I guess we all have felt lonely, isolated, clueless or desperate sometimes, like those characters. I guess I can understand those characters, but I feel the issues could have been explored further, the characters could have been more fulfilled, and the story could have been developed on a more solid ground.
Mainly it's just some ordinary love affairs and emotional disturbance among five plain characters. Willa, a 26-year-old virgin (or older than that), is an isolated and lonely artist with fragile mental state. Patsy, Willa's housemate, is an active married female who is having affair with another man. Tom, Patsy's husband, is vulgar, violent and ... plain. The story started approaching its climax as Patsy decided to run away with another man. Besides some emotional tensions and conflicts among characters, there are not much but Willa's rambling about strange fables, fears, loneliness, nervousness, and her longing for a man. I found the story, dangling from a fragile frame, is cluelessly depressing and bleak.
However in the book some lines about characters' psychology do lose my emotional resonance sometimes. After all I guess we all have felt lonely, isolated, clueless or desperate sometimes, like those characters. I guess I can understand those characters, but I feel the issues could have been explored further, the characters could have been more fulfilled, and the story could have been developed on a more solid ground.
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