WHY novelist Edna O'Brien seemed surprised that her latest novel has caused controversy in Ireland I don't know.

You're asking for trouble if you take a well-known, and particularly brutal murder case, involving a woman, her child and a priest, and use it as the basis for a fictional novel. Especially as the incident is still fresh in many people's mind, having happened only eight years ago.

This Omnibus film sent an emotional O'Brien back to the scene of the crime, not far from where she was born and grew up, to talk to those involved and canvass their opinion. As a means of publicising a new book, it was a cut above the usual promotional gambit.

The murdered woman was a Dublin girl who went to live with her little boy of three in a deserted part of Ireland. She had, in the writer's words, "too much beauty for love" and O'Brien identified with her. "Maybe I have made the choice - writing means more to me than love," she said.

When she read about the killing of Imelda and her son Liam, followed by the murder of a local priest by the same man, she "felt impelled" to write the novel. It was the trigger to write about what happened although she chose to do it in a fictionalised version with the victim becoming Eily Ryan - "an imagined version of Imelda and also myself", she confessed.

She read about the case, watched TV coverage and talked to those in the area who would speak to her about the murder. She admits their attitude was let sleeping dogs lie, partly perhaps because of questions about Imelda's morality. "There wasn't a husband,"said O'Brien, adding she could identify with the dead woman's carefree existence.

There were clips of the novelist in her younger days, saying that "all fiction is fantasised autobiography", which seems to have been her intention in Murder In The Forest. She also found links with the murderer, a mentally disturbed 19-year-old man recently released from prison. As she pointed out: "The borderline between creativity and madness is very thin." O'Brien chose not to describe the moment of the murder in print as she had no wish to be accused of being exploitative.

It's a fine line but she remains defiant about her decision to write the novel. "I will write what I want," she stated firmly. "As a writer I have the right to write anything I want and so I shall.