The Gathering by Anne Enright
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Book Reviews of The Gathering
Book Review: Family Roots
Summary: 5 Stars
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.]
Book Review: Internalised grief, and for grown-ups
Summary: 5 Stars
Anne Enright's The Gathering deserves every ounce of praise it has received, and perhaps a bit more. It's a family history of the Hegartys, told by Veronica after the death of her brother, Liam. So, and therefore, it is a wake, a stream of consciousness response to bereavement. There are more than shades of Molly Bloom here, as Veronica recounts intimate details of her own and her relatives' ultimately inconsequential lives. And despite its obvious - and necessary - preoccupation with death and mourning, it is eventually an optimistic work, as optimistic as it can be when we are all revealed as rather inconsequential, temporal additions to the grand scheme of things, a grand scheme which, itself, is neither grand nor, indeed, a scheme. In such a void, we need blame to compensate grief. And after that is duly apportioned, at least we can just get on with it.
What The gathering is not, by the way, is the kind of book that would appeal to anyone wanting instant gratification, a murder on every page, celebrity, wealth, empty melodrama, character that can be worn, or even axe-grinding. It is not snobbish to say that The Gathering runs kilometres above such pulp. That it deals with the lives of ordinary people in a less than successful family is stated at the outset by the author. Of the Hegarty family experience, Veronica writes, "the great thing about being dragged up is that there is no-one to blame. We are entirely free range. We are human beings in the raw. Some survive it better than others, that's all." Now this is fascinating, because a little later she asserts that when individual Hegartys feel aggrieved with their lot, there is always someone to blame, "because with the Hegartys a declaration of unhappiness is always a declaration of blame." So within the family, blame is impossible to apportion, but always applied. Given my own assertion that we often need blame to compensate grief, this leads us to an understanding of Veronica's diatribe, her frustration at being unable to find someone to blame, but needing to do so in order to cope with the loss. The book, then, is her personal catharsis.
The beauty of The Gathering is its ability to remind us, fairly constantly, of the dysfunctional nature of the Hegarty family, whilst at the same time recording that most of those involved, in one way or other, find some kind of fulfilment in their lives. Liam, the brother who committed suicide by jumping off Brighton pier, was undoubtedly one of the casualties. And eventually the whole family shares his tragedy and, at the very end, ride through and past it.
One aspect of the Hegartys is particularly enigmatic, however, and that is their relation to religion. There's a priest, now an ex-priest, if that is possible, in the family and, at least nominally, they are Catholics. But the religiosity in Veronica's narrative is less than convincing and hints at the grudging, though perhaps she cannot admit this, even to herself. If she were still practising, she would be more deferential. If she had rejected her faith, she would be more cynical. And if she were a sceptic, her attacks would be more vehement. The next time I read The Gathering, I will be careful to note references to religion, since it remains an enigmatic aspect of Veronica's character.
As Veronica's narration progresses, it feels like she is getting things off her chest, a prosaic enough reaction to bereavement. By the end, we are confident that she has achieved her goal and that she will approach at least the next few days of her life with renewed vigour. Until, perhaps, she is plunged again into the miry uniqueness of who she is, its unacceptability, and its inevitability. For that is who we are. Choice is not ours.
Book Review: A psycological masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Skimming through the reviews that have preceded mine I find myself amused by the passion this book has generated. It seems safe to warn any prospective reader that one thing is certain: you will either love or you will hate this novel. The passionate negativity The Gathering has generated is telling, and is I believe due in part to the uncomfortable depths it brings the reader. Enright's book is not a comfortable read. Her book is about Human emotion. She explores her subject with an unflinching directness and power that left this reader unable to tolerate more than a few pages at a time. The plot is of minor importance, really only a literary device allowing the author a framework within which to do due her real work. The novel uses the death of a sibling and the gathering together of an extended family as a vehicle to explore the intense emotions and distant memories these events provoke in the central character. This Enright achieves with brilliance. She has a seemingly magical talent for using language to evoke in the reader a sense of her character's physic experience with all its ambiguity, ambivalence, and irrationality. Emotion is messy stuff and Enright does not shy away from the refuse and detritus. She takes us into the mist strewn land of child hood memory deftly exploring the boundary lands between reality and fiction. Don't expect definitive answers or tidy explanations for what "really" happened. If you are hoping for certainty at the end of the novel you will be disappointed. This is not an easy read. The comments from reviewers bragging about how they read the book in one sitting left me shaking my head. This book is not for the reader who can only give it 2 hours or for the reader who reads 100+ novels a year. It took me 3 weeks to read, and even then I felt that I needed to re-read it from start to finish if I expected to appreciate its full richness. I will admit that I did struggle at times with where Enright was taking me. There were a number (not many) of times when I simply had to move on because I could not follow her. But because of the richness and truth of the rest of the book I assumed that my failure to take meaning from these passages had more to my own failings as a reader than to the writer's "self-indulgence". I also did not find the novel "disjointed" as many reviewers have complained. I found the shifts between present and past seamless and close to my own experience of consciousness. Please, if you commit yourself to reading this book, take your time, taste and digest each word, each sentence, one at a time, and ride with the emotions that this writing evokes.Book Review: "There Are So Few People Given Us To Love And They All Stick"
Summary: 5 Stars
The narrator in Anne Enright's THE GATHERING Veronica-- "an ugly enough thing I had always thought"-- Hegarty is one of nine surviving children out of twelve (with seven miscarriages) of a large Irish family. Liam, the closest sibling to her, both in age (he is eleven months older) and in affection, has died. She has the sad task of making all the burial arrangements that include telling their frail, aged mother. The surviving members of this wildly dysfunctional clan meet for a wake (the gathering) so realistic that it will break your heart.
At one point the narrator says that all big families are the same. Enright has made the Hegartys (she has a dozen ways to desribe the blue of their eyes) symbolic of every large family: those the parents favored, those they didn't, the messers (Liam), the drunks, the most successful, the religious one, the mysterious one, the brightest. This family calls to mind another large family in Thomas Wolfe's 1939 novel LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. The narrative, as the Queen would say in Alan Bennett's recent novel THE UNCOMMON READER, does not progress as the crow flies but rather meanders in and out among three generations of this crazed and in some ways doomed family.
There are family secrets revealed along the way including one that may explain why some of the characters do what they do; on the other hand we cannot be sure since memory is never completely reliable. Enright's haunting prose is also often beautiful. After the birth of her daughter Rebecca, Veronica gets back her sense of smell with an "aromatic rush." At Liam's wake Rebecca must see her mother as a "mislaid giant." Veronica has larged-boned "transvestite ankles." She reminds the reader that there are so "few people given us to love. . . And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other." On the other hand, you do not always like the people you love. One of the most touching scenes out of many occurs when Veronica's old mother finally goes to bed the night that her son Liam lies in a coffin in the downstairs living room. Veronica notices that she sleeps on her own side of the bed, leaving plenty of room for a husband dead many years.
Ms. Enright writes so well about what happens-- love, loss, failure, death-- in every family.
Book Review: We see our own
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book slowly. I had to. If I had not, the pain would have been insurmountable. Even so, the pain was there, a dull throb.
If you have ever grieved (which we nearly all have or will at some point in our lives), then this book will speak to you. Directly, honestly. If you have ever grieved a family member, one you remembered as a child, then this book will speak to you. If your family has secrets, then this book will speak to you. If you have loved and lost, then this book will speak to you.
Basically, I can't imagine an adult who would read this book and not find some connection within. Can't imagine who would not experience a moment of "ah ha" as she read.
On the surface, it's a book about grief (a sister for her brother), but beneath there is a lifetime of grieving. Veronica has witnessed much and even that which she has not witnessed, she feels she knows. As she moves through the layers of her life, she shows us how her family fell apart, came back together, fell apart, came back together. For what else is there in a family but the pushing away and the pulling back close?
And in Veronica's large family, we are able to see our own.
Maybe I'm wrong and this book will make no sense to you. Even so, the writing is a glory to behold as is the story it uncovers.