Shelf life

The Gathering
By Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape. £12.99
ISBN 978-0-224-07873-3

The Bookies were disappointed by the Booker Prize this year. They were expecting good old Ian McEwan or at least Lloyd Jones (no connection) to win, but instead a little-known Irish novelist took the prize.

Before she was on the long list Enright had sold five copies, now she’s in the windows of W.H. Smith’s and being bought by everyone with an interest in literature, though I wonder how many of those thousands of copies sold will be finished.

Bereavement

The Gathering tells the story of a bereavement, and, though it deals with the gathering of the huge Hegarty family (12 children) for a wake in Dublin, there is more concentration on a gathering together of the narrator’s memories. Veronica’s alcoholic brother Liam has walked into the sea with rocks in his pockets, and this shock cuts her tenuous hold on a functional life. She starts to sleep during the day and spends her nights pacing her orderly home drinking and remembering or, perhaps, imagining the past, working her way to the incident which damaged Liam’s mind. Veronica gets her facts muddled; was it in her grandmother’s front room, or was it in the garage, was it she or her sister who swallowed her grandmother’s bathing cap? And in seeking to explain these memories, she goes further back and invents scenes between her grandparents and their friend Lamb Nugent.

Anne Enright herself said that The Gathering is a bleak book. I quite like a bit of bleak. But I quickly realised that the bleakness she was talking about was not found in human tragedy, but in the voice of a narrator who is in constant revulsion at the world. The Hegarty family is thoroughly unlikeable. Enright uses her lyrical and provocative prose to describe a grotesque physicality; her sister’s face has ‘collapsed...has melted as easy as wax, leaving the flesh hanging on to the bones, bones, bones’. And throughout there is a preoccupation with sex as a sordid act. Death, sex and dirt are interlinked in the mind of the narrator; not new connections for those of you who know anything about Freud or have looked at any James Joyce, or, come to think about it, Hamlet.

Don’t bother

The bleakness of this book comes from the mind of the narrator, rather than the sad events portrayed. And it is her distortion of what is good, her dwelling on the grotesque, which makes the book so unpalatable. Whereas in many tragic, even bleak novels, there is another character or perspective which presents reality, here there is no such check. We are stuck with bitter, sour Veronica. So the book becomes disturbing, and actually rather pretentious. Many novels make me weep as I see the lostness of the world, or instruct me as I see how the godless heart builds its idols, other great novels awaken my compassion for the vulnerability of the weak, and the cruelty of society. But this story? I was saddened and sickened. Reader, don’t buy it.

Looking at secular books

Bereavement

Don’t bother

Sarah Allen

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