In The Gathering, the fourth novel by the relatively unknown Irish writer Anne Enright, three generations of an Irish family undergo a brutal, emotional upheaval in the wake of the death of one of their own.
Enright, known for previous works such as What Are You Like? and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, is an alumna of the creative writing program at Britain's University of East Anglia, which has produced other such notable authors (and fellow Booker winners) as Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. Her receipt of the Booker Prize this year came as somewhat of a surprise since The Gathering was not numbered among the frontrunners.
However, what Enright lacks in popular fame, she makes up for in raw emotional and lingering prose. She writes with a casual eloquence that simultaneously disarms and antagonizes the reader. Her staccato sentences flit between faded memory and reality with the result of creating the very believable conscious of Veronica Hegarty. Veronica proves to be so realistic that the reader is willing to brave through 260 pages attempting to comprehend her and the entire events of the plot that surround her.
Veronica's past is a sorrow-stricken blur. The out-of-work magazine writer is the daughter of a careless mother and the sixth of twelve children in a complicated family web. She is an unhappy homemaker who loves and despises her husband and family. Veronica spends her nights avoiding the sexual advances of her husband, wiling away the late hours drinking and spinning escapist stories around her own life and past. In these fantasy tales, mostly devoted to Ada Merriman and Lambert Nugent, her grandmother and her fictional grandfather, Veronica writes the history of this couple and their romances. She writes these stories as a manifestation of her desires to experience love and serenity rather than the monotony and pain of her everyday life. Fusing fiction and reality, Veronica weaves together her ideal life. What she does not remember, she creates.
Through her constant daydreaming, Veronica builds an untrustworthy narrative that naturally becomes difficult to sympathize with.
Veronica's character does not give off a good impression - she is constantly drinking and spends more time wallowing than trying to actually make a change. However, as more of her life and family are revealed, the reader realizes that these entangled thoughts, these leaps of imagination are a coping mechanism for dealing with her troubled past.
Her relationships with her family are of a love-hate nature. Each day of her life blisters with disillusion. Veronica is loathe to make love to her devoted husband, likening the one-sided experience to "quartering a chicken." This is reflective of her disgust with men as a whole, another casualty of her past. To her men are instruments of pain, unthinking and unfeeling. It seems a bit counterintuitive, then, that at one point in the novel, she inflicts pain on herself just to overcome the numbness that pervades her life.
She blazes through mismatched, disorganized memories, trying throughout the novel
to describe the most complex of her relationships, that with her brother Liam.
Liam is Veronica's enigmatic older sibling, her emotional twin. His untimely death remains a mystery for much of the book which spends its pages tracing his self-destruction back to a single unspeakable incident during his childhood. The reader learns that Veronica has repressed what recollections she had about this incident, and only after Liam's death does she undergo an introspection profound enough to realize the truth that had been staring at her down the hallways of her memory.
Liam lived his life with abandon and was the subject of conversation more often than the converser. He was an alcoholic who drowned to death, but not in drink. His death was more of a cleansing release, an act of self-destruction so pure as to render him nearly blameless. It is his blamelessness in part that contributes to Veronica's paralyzing inability to understand Liam.
Throughout the novel, Veronica also grapples with the personalities of her other siblings, dwelling often on some of their defining and sometimes inexcusable flaws. There is the supposedly psychotic Mossie, who has turned into a model man with the "perfect" family; drunk and promiscuous Kitty; the insufferable holier-than-thou Bea; Ernest, the hypocritical priest; the mysterious Alice; Ita, who is content to disappear behind her husband and the cheerful twins, Ivor and Jem.
The Hegarty clan reunites, piece by piece, at Liam's funeral where Veronica's sorrow comes to a head. She yearns to let out the secret she realizes that she has been keeping all these years, but she does not. Veronica is a woman who never really grew out of her childhood, out of its fancies, out of its fears.
The plot and themes of the novel are hardly unique and actually bear some strong resemblances to those of other recent works such as Ian McEwan's Atonement, whose narrator is also taken with fictionalizing her memories in an attempt to heal the pain caused by her faulty recollections.
In Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship, the slow death of the heroine's brother causes three generations of women to reevaluate their relationships with each other and with their families.
Finally, the incident of abuse that damages lives irrevocably strongly resembles the plight of Estha and Rahel in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Despite the lack of originality, the pain of losing innocence and the destruction that pain can wreak are powerful themes in Enright's novel, and understandably leave the strongest after-effects.
The Gathering can be a difficult read, not for its grammatical sophistication, but for the mess of lives that it describes. Enright is first and foremost an impressionist who paints a portrait of a modern woman defeated by family, circumstances and self. Somewhere amidst the jumble of emotions and scenes that Enright presents there lies an ultimate evaluation of Veronica, but whether it is favorable is subjective to each reader and his or her degree of sympathy.
