Gathering
flames
Anne
Enright’s The Gathering had enthusiastic reviews
when it was published earlier this year, and I picked it up in
the shops and put it down again more than once. I finally picked
it up permanently when it was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
Enright has an ear for a memorable title - The Portable Virgin,
The Wig My Father Wore - so at first sight The Gathering
seems a little banal. But it is a family story, and as we go through
the pages and remember that happiness writes white, and that each
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (”I find that being
part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive”),
we realise that we might well add Storm to the end of
the title.
“I saw a man with tertiary syphilis at Mass,
once,” is how the narrator, Veronica Hegarty, opens one
chapter, and it sums up the sexuality and Irishness of The
Gathering neatly. Hegarty is one of a large clan, and is
obsessed with sex and penises in particular, her self-loathing
in the sexual act matched only by her loathing for her wealthy
husband Tom (”Tom moves money around, electronically. Every
time he does this, a tiny bit sticks to him. Day by day. Hour
by hour. Minute by minute. Quite a lot of it, in the long run”).
When I sleep with Tom … what he
wants, what my husband has always wanted, and the thing
I will not give him, is my annihilation. This is the way
his desire runs. It runs close to hatred.
And if your response to that is, who can
blame him?, then she’s ahead of you already (”Christ
I wish I wasn’t such a hard bitch sometimes”), or
if it’s to doubt the plausibility of it - or of other
pronouncements like “Children don’t feel pain”
- she’s covered that one too, when as early as page one,
line two, she warns us that “I’m not sure if it
did really happen” and later, “I doubt all this
can be strictly true.” What she’s talking about
here is the central question of the book: what happened to her
nearest brother Liam when he was nine, that caused his recent
suicide as an alcoholic at the age of 40?
With those warnings in mind, my take on it is that
what she tells us did happen to Liam - the storm breaks around
the middle of the book - is that it really happened to her. Otherwise
her rage and hatred make for little sense and even less sympathy.
Nonetheless there is bitter wit aplenty (”the cloth of his
trousers wrinkles and sags around a crotch that is a mystery no
one is interested in any more”) and frequently beautiful
descriptions, such as this imagined scene of Dublin in the time
of her grandparents (”the bookie and the whore”),
in 1925:
Nugent cocks an ear after the escaping motor.
There is a pause as the engine fades, and then the silence starts
to spread. It seeps into the foyer of the Belvedere; the distant
rustle of streets turning over from day into evening, as the
night deepens and the drinking begins - elsewhere. As women
shush their babies, and men ease their feet out of their boots,
and girls who have been working all evening wash themselves
in distant rooms and check a scrap of mirror, before going out
to work again.
But those coming to The Gathering looking
for a straight story will be disappointed - and probably maddened.
Enright’s Veronica goes around the houses in telling her
tale, from reinventing a love triangle two generations ago, to
flipping through the album of her own childhood and then bringing
us back to the present day. In doing so the powerful and sometimes
precious language gets under the skin and works on you when you
are not expecting it.
As a result I liked The Gathering much
more on completion than I thought I would at any time while reading
it. With the additional attention its Booker listing will earn
it, the book will polarise opinion as John Banville and Ali Smith
have done in recent years, and some will want to toss the damn
thing on an Irish peat fire. But persistence shows that this challenging
and interesting book burns brightly on its own, and among the
bleak flames it gives out there is a peculiar sort of warmth.
John
Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
