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	• The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) Anne Enright Grove Press, Black Cat, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 126 reviews view larger image
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Excellent

Enright skillfully takes the reader inside the mind of a woman in the midst of a crisis for an intimate view of a family's history and the impact of that history on the lives of all involved. The novel is touching without being overwhelmingly sad. Brilliantly written, it's a worthwhile read that well deserves the Booker prize it received.

Family Roots

Veronica, the eighth of the twelve Hegarty children, travels to England to collect the body of Liam, her immediately older brother, while the other surviving members of the family gather in Dublin for his funeral. But the title is misleading. What is being gathered together in this story is not primarily the various members of the Hegarty clan (although most of them make an appearance), but a rag-bag of childhood memories as Veronica struggles to make sense of her own life and Liam's in the context of family history. She makes this clear in the opening sentence: "I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen." Or sort of clear; her doubts about the past are part of the point.

I had a disturbing sense of déjà vu on picking up the paperback, because the pier on the cover closely recalls another recent Man Booker winner, Graham Swift's LAST ORDERS, which is also about a gathering of family and friends to solemnize a death. And that first sentence seems to invade the territory of John Banville, whose most recent Man Booker winner, THE SEA, is also about recapturing the traumatic events of an Irish childhood. But I needn't have worried; Anne Enright's voice -- Veronica's voice -- is all her own: straightforward, witty, imaginative, yet bracingly honest, dwelling at one moment on skin and sweat, then cleansing it with gentle lyricism.

Veronica's first-person narrative jumps around over four generations. The earliest passages tell how her grandmother Ada may have met her future husband; the latest ones extend some months beyond the funeral, and relate to her own family life with a college-lecturer husband and two daughters. Several things gradually become clear. First, that much of what Veronica narrates as fact may be misremembered, reconstructed, or the wholesale products of her imagination. Second, that her main concern is to trace the causes of her brother's failures, which we begin to recognize even through the glow of her fierce love for him. And third, that Veronica herself is also in trouble, struggling with a crisis in her own life and marriage, that only the act of writing may help her to resolve.

Despite Veronica's problems and Liam's, this history of the Hegarty family is a counterpoint to the success story of Ireland during the past decades, as it has emerged from its backwater to become one of the leading engines of the new Europe. Veronica, who grew up sharing a bedroom with at least two other siblings, can now drive to an airport on a whim, present a credit card, and consider a flight halfway around the world. Anne Enright shares Penelope Lively's feeling for changing eras (as shown in MOON TIGER or CONSEQUENCES), and equals her ability to take a relatively common story and render it far from ordinary through writing that pulses with life. And her technique of using chilhood memories to reflect a whole family history reminds me of Kate Atkinson's marvelous BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, my touchstone for such books. But Enright's style is very much her own, and her people are well worth knowing for their own sake. Meet them.

[I have now read a number of the mostly-negative Amazon reviews. Yes, this is a non-linear narrative, but I found that exhilarating rather than difficult. Others might be disturbed by the unreliability of the reporting, but it leads to some marvelous effects, such as the set-piece description of the meeting of Ada Merriman and Lambert Nugent in chapter 3 that is turned on its head in the last few sentences. It also makes it less a history of events than a psychological portrait of the narrator, which is surely the main point. As for the obsession with sexual organs, especially male ones, I see this in retrospect as a meaningful reflection of Veronica's trauma -- but I admit to being irritated at the time by what I took as merely a regrettable quirk of Enright's style.]

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The reviews here vary hugely between 1 to 5 - maybe that's because Anne Enright is a thought-provoking writer who is capable of generating a strong emotional response...I read the novel while travelling and found something in the narrative that went comfortably with my roaming state of mind - On the road, you tend to have time and quiet to look back and remember. In the novel, there is an important journey taking place in the mind of Veronica, the main character, and it is a journey that is raw and profound. Yes, it is a sad book. So sad it kicks you in the gut. But Enright has enough wit to make her characters lively and sometimes even funny. It is ultimately uplifting and true. If you are not afraid of a difficult story well told, read 'The Gathering'!

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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