DOWN BY THE RIVER.<i> By Edna O’Brien</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 265 pp., $23</i>

When I was asked to review Edna O’Brien’s latest novel, “Down by the River,” I called my sister in London. I wanted to know if she was still reading this prolific and seminal Irish writer who was so important to us 20 years ago. Newly arrived in London from a small town, we related heavily to Kate and Baba, the mismatched Irish friends of “The Country Girls” trilogy, O’Brien’s first fictional work, for whom England’s capital represented freedom from the bigotry of rural Irish life. Now, my sister confessed, she’s come to reject O’Brien’s deep fatalism about intimacy as “unbelievably depressing.” And she hates the way O’Brien’s women see themselves: “They’re always victims.”

Some things never change: The women in “Down by the River” are still victims. But I’m going to have to tell my sister that our old favorite is venturing into new literary territory--realist fiction rooted in contemporary Irish affairs.

Ireland’s troubles are not totally absent from O’Brien’s work. “House of Splendid Isolation” features an Irish Republican Army terrorist hiding out in a widow’s house. But in most of her work, political strife tends to be more the background music to her characters’ personal musings. In “Down by the River,” which is based on the famous “X” case of 1992 involving a 14-year-old girl made pregnant by her best-friend’s father, politics is inescapable.

O’Brien sticks closely to the main facts of the case. When the girl was prevented by the Irish High Court from going to England for an abortion (illegal in Ireland), the ensuing international outcry led to a reversal by the Irish Supreme Court of the lower court decision, forcing a public referendum in which the Irish people voted overwhelmingly for girls in her situation to be allowed to go abroad for abortions. The girl had a miscarriage before she could take advantage of the court decision. Her abuser was jailed for 14 years.

If this had been an earlier work, O’Brien might have explored the inner life of her pregnant 14-year-old heroine, Mary. Instead, she is more interested in the politics of abortion and all its public players--abortion rights foes and advocates, lawyers, doctors--until Mary seems almost to have no voice at all.

And yet, astute readers will catch the familiar images and themes that weave through all of O’Brien’s 20 books and innumerable short stories (many of which have been published in the New Yorker), which have prompted some critics to remark that O’Brien has only one story to tell. (Although what author doesn’t braid and rebraid the same obsession in an effort to pin down some perpetually elusive personal demon?)

“Down by the River” is in some ways yet another reframing of O’Brien’s continuing obsession with not simply Ireland but, the Ireland she left as a young woman. Though she has lived in London for 30 years, O’Brien can never leave the Ireland of her imagination behind.

In “Down by the River,” as in all her works, the Irish countryside, soaked in bloodshed and myth, is inevitably a dreary symbol of death, cruelty and stagnation, epitomized by an image repeated here from earlier fiction, the image of a dark copse where a donkey died and decayed.

There are also the abusive father and self-sacrificing mother. Even the details reflect earlier works. The father likes horses, the mother raises hens, while the perennial dog lingers at the gate, needing caresses and hoping, like previous O’Brien dogs and many of her characters, that despite continual kicks, he will be loved.

Mary is the typical O’Brien overly sensitive girl: She has a Kate-like convent crush on a nun and a Baba-like friend. And like all O’Brien’s heroines, however far they might be from their rural origins and however sophisticated their current milieu, Mary is haunted by the oppressive, joy-denying, guilt-laden religious dogma of her childhood, the superstitious bigotry of village life forever an evil stamp upon her soul. (Not surprisingly, until 1972, O’Brien’s first seven works of fiction were banned in Ireland and were even publicly burned by the priest in her native village.)

If O’Brien’s older stories also dwell on Ireland’s awesome beauty as a symbol of purity and simplicity for those mired in urban life--if they emphasize the double-edged nature of life, swinging between death and beauty, between joyous, steamy sex and despair (for taking one solitary vacation, the heroine in “August Is a Wicked Month” pays with the death of her child)--there is little of that joy here. Country scenes in “Down by the River” pulse with a sinister sexuality, from the stark coupling of a stallion and mare to the suggestive “dark coils” of the river where Mary considers drowning herself.

A number of British reviewers (always hard on O’Brien) have criticized her for the uneasy mix of old images with current affairs. And it’s true that a kind of authorial documentary voice occasionally bumps up against the novel’s overall lyric tone. There’s an awkward chapter in which the daughter of a judge makes feminist speeches at her father. This novel also lacks the assured, richly textured language that makes “The Country Girls” trilogy and her short stories so remarkable. And yet it works.

The key is to see “Down by the River” not as realistic fiction (despite having the outrage of an old-fashioned protest novel) but as the Irish equivalent of a Faulkner novel, a re-imagined, more deeply colored, symbolic version of the real thing. (Faulkner, Joyce and Chekhov are O’Brien’s acknowledged literary idols.)

For example, O’Brien makes some significant changes to the reality of the “X” case. The fictional sexual abuser is Mary’s own father, James, a wonderful portrait of self-pitying self-absorption, who pursues Mary with increasing violence after her mother, his wife, dies of cancer. In an especially shocking scene, James tries to abort Mary’s pregnancy with a broomstick. What happens to the father in the final pages of the novel is more dramatic, more appalling, than the fate of his real-life counterpart and pushes the drama almost to the point of gothic melodrama, certainly to a level of overwrought, emotional excess.

O’Brien has always enjoyed playing with different styles in an effort to pull new insights out of familiar material. “Casualties of Peace” has parallel stories with heroines from different classes. “A Pagan Place” is told in the second-person singular. “Night” is the monologue of a woman lying in bed. The narrative in “Down by the River” is quite different from, say, the measured, seamless prose of O’Brien’s New Yorker stories. Tugging the reader along at suspense thriller speed, it bounces among short scenes, flashing the story at the reader in jagged glimpses of horror comparable to the shifting photography of television news, even as the fervent language transforms each scene into a small story or lyric poem.

Out of these broken, over-wrought, pared-down pieces, out of the tension between documentary and poem, O’Brien surely intended an archetypal story, a sort of Irish epic, that takes all her old themes and intensifies them to the point of impersonal tragedy, distilling the grief of all traumatized women who don’t make news headlines. From the first chapter, Mary (and surely the choice of name is deliberate, the Virgin impregnated willy-nilly by the God-like father) is every woman who has ever been hurt by a man. The road she and her father are walking along seems to speak of history, “of the old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood.” When he molests her for the first time, “she thought she had always known that it would happen, or that it had happened, this, a reenactment of a petrified time.”

Thus, “Down by the River” is more than O’Brien’s typical reiteration of male-female torment and offers instead a greater story about power--the power wielded by fathers, states, institutions, anyone with an agenda (there are a couple of terrifying scenes featuring abortion foes)--the kind of power that crushes individual happiness. On the run from her father, saved from drowning by a neighbor who later tries to get her an abortion in England, Mary looks at her face in the neighbor’s mirror and sees not the terror of a little girl but of “an animal, animal eyes staring out from the prongs of an iron trap.” It’s a viscerally terrifying moment.

What’s also new here is O’Brien’s attitude toward victimhood. Like other O’Brien heroines who haul themselves up from the depths, Mary has a fine thread of resilience at her core that wears but never snaps. But she is also boosted throughout her terrible journey by individuals who offer her genuine kindness without an ulterior motive. There’s Luke, the gentle musician, a kind of fairy-tale prince who gives her shelter, and Mona, another pregnant girl, who offers lively female companionship. If, in other works, O’Brien was concerned with the essential loneliness of the human state, here she offers a glimpse of community.

And with all the gloom in this dark and desperate book, there are hints of O’Brien’s old life-affirming humor. Her voice has always been double-edged, as if she herself were split down the middle. On the one hand, she is a passive, dreamy Kate, but she is also a wise-cracking Baba who shrugs and says, “Yeah, life sucks, but I’m going to get the most I can out of it.” In “Down by the River,” a disc jockey’s patter is both disgusting and delightfully absurd, an upbeat note of presentation at odds with the downbeat of the subject matter.

Yes, I must definitely call my sister. For in this moving addition to O’Brien’s impressive body of work, fatalism is edged with genuine glimmers of hope, and the reader discovers, despite evidence to the contrary, that there is goodness in the world.