The Sigla Blog

Ahead of tonight’s Booker announcement and in the Blue Peter spirit of here’s-one-I-made-earlier (my one hand would completely malfunction typing out 1,000 words), here’s my recent interview with Anne Enright about her nominated novel, The Gathering. Tonight, Shane’s cash is on Mister Pip, and Dove Grey Reader will probably plump for that or Enright. Does anyone think On Chesil Beach will win? Over on the Booker site, there’s a breakdown of betting odds on previous winners and favourites since 2002. Interestingly, the bookie’s favourite hasn’t won in the last four years. Publishers Picador have a new blog, and a staffer outlines the betting and her five reasons for backing Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People.

Anne Enright Interview
In the opening chapter of Anne Enright’s bleak-but-brilliant novel The Gathering, 40-something protagonist Veronica speaks of laying out memories like “clean, white bones”?. The book, which centres around the post-Catholic Hegarty family mourning their brother’s death, is obsessed with remembrance, and many characters confuse memory with history. Nugent, a peripheral figure central to the darkest aspect of the book, hovers over the collective Hegarty consciousness and Enright explains that he is the key to this juxtaposition. “The very unstable strand in the book about Nugent is about the moment where memory becomes history, but imagination and memory are very close and you have to ask is history is something that happens in your head”. Themes of emigration, drink and loss have been totemically Irish, but Enright takes a more panoramic approach, even if she was surprised by people’s reaction to her subject.

“Someone said to me ‘Oh everyone’s written a family epic and now you’re writing one’ and it made me feel that as a more contemporary writer, I wasn’t supposed to go there, that I was supposed to look forward, to reflect the realities, that this was my function within the Irish scene”. Enright baulks at the idea of such literary pigeon-holing. If assumptions are made about Irish writers tackling the family, even more are drawn about women and their subject matter. We discuss Muriel Gray’s assertion, when judging the Orange Prize earlier this year, that too much writing by women is about “domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas”. Enright is pragmatic about this. “It depends on whether you expect the novel to be social, and if you do, you can find too much kitchen sink stuff drab. But there’s a strong tradition in women’s writing of introspection, of interior monologue, and based on that I’d claim Joyce as a woman. I sometimes worry that my work is too introspective but the closer I get to a character, the more freedom I have to fly in the narrative. I can go anywhere and say anything.”

Which is exactly what Veronica does. Throughout the book, she is sexually frank about her life, from past dalliances to her current sexless marriage and detailed descriptions of her husband’s physicality. Has she encountered any negative responses to it? “I keep expecting little old ladies to come up and hit me with their handbags”, she laughs, “but they seem fine. I’ve also warned some people that the material is quite strong and they look at me much to say ‘what do you think I am?’ Because of the damage in the book - and some of that damage is sexual - I had to write about sex in a certain way. I’ve spoken to people who’ve been in these situations and often they’re very explicit about their experiences. It’s graphic and unpleasant and I thought I’d try to be true to that a little.”

For the duration of The Gathering, Veronica’s experience is broad and brittle, from wine-addled grief to a barely disguised disgust at her mother. “She harbours so much anger towards her mother because of her absence, it’s very infantile rage. Mothers are such strong figures that when you’re writing a book they can unbalance everything, but I wanted to undercut the idea of the Irish mammy. To undercut that martyr figure of ‘isn’t she wonderful, after having 17 children and the house is as clean as a new pin’.”

This post-modern Irish mother now sinks a nightly bottle of wine in her immaculate post-boom home, but Enright claims she is not knocking contemporary society, nor looking back with a poor mouth retrospection (”there were no mangoes in Ireland in 1986″). Instead she traces a continuity that still strongly exists. “The family in Ireland is still a very cohesive unit and very much sticks together. The Hegarty family in the book are called dysfunctional, but then how is a family supposed to function, especially after the death of one of them? They all get on, but nobody can ever leave a family in Ireland, it’s Wittgensteinian. They might try but they won’t get very far.”

Enright’s characters have been described as “wanting revenge, out-of-touch and out of control”, but Enright doesn’t entirely agree. “They’re slightly numb and suffer from disconnection, but I don’t think they’re very vengeful. One of the things I say about my characters is that they’re not perfect; not noble or just. Sometimes when a reader climbs into a book, it makes them feel better if they think they’re reading about a good person. My characters are flawed and are - in Veronica’s case certainly - unreliable narrators.”

Given the similarity in age between Enright and her protagonist, readers might assume that she’s drawing on personal experience. “You just can’t. And if there is that fear, then you have to take it and put it in a box under the bed. Somebody wrote me a worried-sounding letter saying ‘It must have been a very hard book to write’ so I replied saying ‘It’s ok, it’s just a book!’ In fact, I was surprised on how bleak the book was, especially as my own life seems to be going so well.”

Which brings us to the elephant in the corner, next Tuesday’s Booker Prize announcement. Has she read the other nominated books? “No, and I haven’t read anything about them. I’ve smelled reviews from a distance but I’ve been so busy. I had a little stomach lurch on the DART yesterday and realised I’ll have to plan my days until it’s over, but then I’ve written an essay and finished two short stories. Being short-listed has been a blast, but it won’t help me write the next book”, she muses practically. As it happens the next book is already finished. Taking Pictures, a collection of short stories is out next year and along with The Gathering should cement Enright’s standing as one of Ireland’s best literary stylists.