SOURCE: "Against Ample Adversities." in Times Literary Supplement, September 18, 1992, p. 23.

In the following review, Craig provides a mixed evaluation of Time and Tide.

"Fear death by water." This injunction from The Waste Land must strike a chord with Edna O'Brien, whose earliest heroine—in The Country Girls—lost her mother in a boating accident; now, eleven novels on, it's the heroine's son who goes down with the Marchioness (as we read on the opening page of Time and Tide). This central disaster is prefaced by a lot of subsidiary disasters; the whole drift, of Time and Tide, is to show what a star-crossed Irishwoman can endure, without going under.

What is wrong with Nell, a one-time Irish country girl and mother-of-two? She has many resources, yet seems impelled to get the maximum poignancy out of life. She suffers to the full. Some kind of ancestral acrimony seems to...