Anne Enright is an Irish writer who has remained close to her roots. She writes about relationships, about families and exile: about going away and returning. Family relationships are at the core of The Gathering, which won the Booker Prize in 2007. Narrated in the voice of an adult daughter Veronica, it centres around a large family, who come together following the suicide of their brother. The sibling reunion triggers old memories and brings up old, very dark secrets.
The Green Road, published in 2015, also centres on a family reunion. In the first part of the book we meet the widely dispersed siblings, and learn about their lives. They are summoned back to the family home in County Clare for Christmas by their manipulative mother. There is the sense of them walking back to their childhood space. Memories flood back and the childhood stories are picked open again. In the words of one brother, it is ‘like living in a hole in the ground’.
Motherhood is a theme of both books. The frail mother in The Gathering has given birth to twelve children. She is a very shadowy presence in the family. She cannot quite remember her own children’s names and she is almost invisible to her adult daughter. ‘I think I would pass her in the street if she wore a different coat’. The mother in The Green Road is a difficult, manipulative, unbalanced woman, casting a shadow over the lives of her children, who try to find ways to please her. When Dan, her favourite, announces that he wants to be a priest, his mother collapses and takes to her bed. Emerging days later, she tells her daughter Hanna, ‘I made him the way he is. He is my son and I don’t like him, and he doesn’t like me either’. When Hanna says, ‘But you like me Mammy’, her mother responds minimally, ‘I like you now’. Her children feel their mother’s disappointment. Emmett comments to his sister, ‘At least you didn’t go bald … She took that very personally’.
Motherhood is also central to Actress (2020). Norah, the narrator, is writing about Katherine, her long dead mother, a once famous actress whose career declined and who deteriorated into insanity. Norah retraces her mother’s steps, attempting to make sense of Katherine’s life, trying to discover what was real about her mother and about their relationship, and who among the many men in her mother’s life might have been her father. Norah reflected that Katherine was always acting, on and off the stage, ‘She did not need to pretend to be my mother, when she was my mother already’.
Enright’s most recent book, The Wren, The Wren (2023), deals with three generations of women, whose lives have been overshadowed by their grandfather, a minor poet who abandoned his family. His daughter Carmel is haunted by memories of her childhood, with an absent father, an ailing mother and a sister who competed for the limited adult attention. She feels that she herself has failed as a mother, ‘It was always such a wrangle. She could not hold her daughter, and she could not let her daughter go’. Carmel’s daughter Nell does not know her father and only knows her grandfather from grainy TV footage. She escapes her forceful, needy mother, only to enter an abusive sexual relationship. The wounds are passed on.
Enright goes to the heart of relationships and brings her characters vividly to life, as adult children probe their childhood memories. Our past shapes us, but it doesn’t have to define our future. In The Gathering there is redemption for Veronica. After running away in despair, the thought of her two small girls brings her back home, ‘there is no leaving the girls. They are always with me’. Perhaps their childhood memories will be less bleak.
Dymphna Crowe
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