BY MICHAEL BRESLIN
Much has been made in media releases that this Man Booker Prize publication, her fifth work of fiction by Irish housewife and mother, Anne Enright is about an Irish wake. It's no such thing. Fair enough, scenes from the wakehouse, with the relatives having to scramble over people's kneeling feet on the stairs, occur near the end, but this is, as the title indicates, a family preparing for the gathering, from Ireland, England and Peru.
The author is the narrator, a member of a normal enough family but which, we quickly learn, are as dysfunctional as any other family. The theme is 'family', telling how people and the years and, in her father's case, tradition have shaped/mis-shapped them.
In a way, the book falls into the genre of 'a typical Irish family' but few authors have written in such an ascerbic and brutal manner as Ms Enright. It is very much a book for mature readers, be they adult or clued in young people, with candid references to sex and a oh so dismissive attitude to the rituals and icons of the Catholic Church.
VISITOR
Among them was Frank Duff of the Legion of Mary fame ('a religious organisation dedicated to inanity and the making of tea') who was a frequent visitor to her granny's house. As a wee girl, he had patronisingly stroked her cheek and, when she was able to comprehend things, she discovered that he spent his time weaning girls off prostitution and taking them on retreats.
The author's razor-sharp mind decided there was something incongruous about this and, likewise when she sees her mother's frustrated lover, the bookie, Lambert Nugent engaging her wee brother, Liam in a sexual act.
In a way, that becomes the watershed for both of them. Thereafter, Liam's life spirals downwards via drunk and drugs until he walked out into the Irish Sea from Brighton Pier, his pockets laden with stones.
Her recall of his 'squat' in London of the 60's, where she joined him for a while, will evoke memories of The Flower people with older readers, but so too will Liam's 'ever so near but yet so far' near achievements.
The author too is a rebel, electing to stay up all night writing and, when Liam's body is recovered, it's open season for her pen to pick off, one by one, those within and without her family and their strange ways. There's her brother, a priest in Peru who leaves the priesthood but doesn't tell his Bishop and warns her not to. He prepares for the gathering.
Sadly, her father can't be there. Having fathered 12 children and seven more who miscarried, he's long gone from this world but her mother, despite her Alzheimer's, is still there, but insists on calling her by another sister's name.
We are told: 'He did not love her enough to leave her alone. My father, I suspect, had sex the way his children got drunk, which is to say, against his better judgement'.
As a descriptive writer, Ms Enright possesses a poetic eye. Invited by her granny, Ada to 'do me up', she noted: 'Her thigh was surprisingly little. It had an inky map of broken veins in a cluster above the sag of her stocking'.
And, has a coffin lying in repose scene been given a more potent description than this: 'I cannot see his (Liam's) face properly from where I sit. The wood of the coffin angles down, slicing across the bulge of his cheek'.
The author's mind goes back to her teenage years as she strives to break news of the death to her doting mother: 'I am Veronica Hegarty. Standing at the sink in my school uniform, 15 maybe 16 years old, crying over a lost boyfriend and being comforted by a woman who cannot for the life of her remember my name. I am Veronica Hegarty, 39, spooning sugar in to a cup of tea for the loveliest woman in Dublin who has just had some terrible news'.
The chapters of the book swing back and forth like that, like a reaper going round and round a field of corn, exposing another cross-section of life for study.
One memorable scene is recreated, that which all children dread, being made to say goodbye to someone in the coffin, no not Liam but her bald grandfather.
'There was one thing that made my cry, waiting for Charlie's moustache to move and finding that ti did not move. Ada back beside us, whispering, 'Say goodbye now. Shush, she said to me, stop crying'.
Curiously, death and church occupy a fair amount of space, and lend themselves to black humour that is both irreverent and so funny. For instance, the author recalls how at Communion time, her father (who seems to head off somewhere for a living), 'stood at the end of the bench as we trooped by, like letting sheep out of a gate'.
The author's honest has to be admired. They say that the artist suffers for his art and, here, it would be surprising if all of her characters are made up. The book, loosely, has a beginning and an end, but nothing's resolved as in, say, 'A Tale of Two Cities' where the landscape is stark and the language brooding.
Having managed to pay their respects at the wake, the Hegarty family, linking their 'zonked-out mother', make it to the funeral, in the author's memorable phraseology, 'grown up, we all looked like cuckoos, every single one of us. We were all wrong'.
This is an uncomfortable read. The subject matter, a family not at war, just family members, as treated by this author, are hardly a bundle of laughs.
Yet, each in turn is enhanced by the descriptive ability of a writer who seems to have a word for every sound possible under the sun.
'The Gathering', by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape and is now available in Eason's, Enniskillen in paperback at the reduced price of £9.99.
