O’Brien’s astonishing new novel starts as pastoral comedy and steadily darkens. Illustration by Tina Berning

People talk about “late style” in classical music, but what might “late style” in contemporary fiction look like? In late work by Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Golding, and now Edna O’Brien, you can detect a certain impatience with formal or generic proprieties; a wild, dark humor; a fearlessness in assertion and argument; a tonic haste in storytelling, so that the usual ground-clearing and pacing and evidentiary process gets accelerated or discarded altogether, as if it were (as it so often can be) mere narrative palaver that is stopping us from talking about what really matters. In much of that late work, there is a slightly thinned atmosphere, the prose a little less rich and hospitable than previously, the characters less full or persuasive, a general sense of dimmed surplus—but not in Edna O’Brien’s astonishing new novel, “The Little Red Chairs” (Little, Brown), her seventeenth. O’Brien is eighty-five years old, and praising this novel for its ambition, its daring vitality, its curiosity about the present age and about the lives of those displaced by its turbulence shouldn’t be mistaken for the backhanded compliment that all this is remarkable given the author’s advanced age. It’s simply a remarkable novel.

“The Little Red Chairs,” though thick with life, does indeed exhibit the kind of cussed freedom that one associates with longevity, and with long confidence in artistic practice. It mixes and reinvents inherited forms, blithely shifts from third-person to first-person narration, reproduces dreams and dramatic monologues. It’s a realist novel—almost a historical novel—about a Bosnian Serb war criminal, modelled on Radovan Karadžić, who has escaped international detection and has arrived in Cloonoila, an obscure little Irish town. (The novel’s title comes from a commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Serbian siege, when thousands of red chairs, representing the victims, were arrayed in Sarajevo’s main street, including many hundreds of small ones for the children.) In Cloonoila, he begins a new life of subterfuge, as Dr. Vladimir Dragan, “Healer and Sex Therapist.” In this broadly realist mode, O’Brien pays sympathetic attention to many different lives, from ordinary Irish villagers (the priest, the nun, the draper’s wife) to refugees, migrants, and displaced workers in London.

But her novel is also a piece of mythmaking, which begins like a tale from Irish folklore: one winter evening, a stranger arrives in town, “bearded and in a long dark coat and white gloves.” People later report “strange occurrences on that same winter evening; dogs barking crazily, as if there was thunder, and the sound of the nightingale.” O’Brien can sound like the László Krasznahorkai of “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a lawless and fantastical novel about the arrival, in a small Hungarian town, of a semi-criminal band of circus hands. In this mythical or magical mode, she is not ashamed to serve up a measure of novelistic Irish cliché (the priest, the nun, the draper’s wife), mixing it with bitter contemporary reality: the young Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and Bosnian exiles who work as service staff at the Castle, the town’s posh hotel.

As fairy tale, O’Brien’s novel is both harrowing and absurdly funny: what will this provincial community make of the glamorous impostor who says he is from Montenegro? How will Father Damien, the local priest, deal with the pastoral offerings of the Serbian Orthodox New Age sex therapist? The story hovers between recorded history and green fancy, and ends as theatrically as it began, with a description of an amateur production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Reading this book, marbled with its different generic veins, is not always a straightforward or stable journey; some parts are more convincing or affecting than others. But it is always a vital and engrossing experience.

It has been fifty-six years since the notorious publication of O’Brien’s first novel, “The Country Girls,” and it’s easy, when a writer has become part of the fabric of one’s life, to stop noticing how that fabric, once scandalously abrasive, still rubs against the skin. “I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women,” she writes, in her story “A Scandalous Woman.” Her novels of the nineteen-sixties, once censored by fearful Irish authorities for their frank depictions of sex and female desire, no longer scandalize, but they have retained their deeper, authentic radicalism: they commit themselves to exploring the lives of women as gambles on freedom and acts of rebellion—against the prohibitions of religion, the judgment of petty societies, the close disapproval of mothers, the expectations of marriage and parenthood, and the carelessness or indifference, or worse, of men.

It is a large, bold, and very various collection of novels and stories; the new novel is surely as good as anything O’Brien has written. I had forgotten what a funny, colloquial writer she can be, and how quickly and tartly she can animate a minor character or the fragment of a life. She has a brilliant ear for offhand description, the kind that immediately situates us in a location, or in a consciousness. One of the townspeople of Cloonoila is glancingly introduced as “Fifi, who was a bit of a card from her time in Australia,” a phrase that might seem like nothing much but that instantly summarizes a community’s world view, precisely because the imputation is never explained: Australia just equals oddity.

A good deal of O’Brien’s prose naturally falls into a loose and chatty free indirect discourse, edging comically (in good Irish literary fashion) toward stream of consciousness. Here is Sister Bonaventure, who travels around the area doing good works: