Review of The Gathering by Anne Enright

I remember a commentator once remarking that Beckett’s Waiting For Godot was a play where “nothing happens…twice.” Anne Enright’s novel is similar because the plot is not overly complicated, and, in fact, not much happens in this novel. Let me explain by first offering a prosaic summary. After some pages, the narrator introduces herself to us as Veronica Hegarty. She is the one who is responsible for gathering all the clan together - there are some twelve siblings in her family - for the funeral and wake of her brother Liam. She has been the closest in age and sympathy to Liam, and his death has really shaken her up badly. The novel recounts how she sets about contacting her siblings and breaking the news to her mother.  It also relates her coming to terms with her own ageing and mortality, as well as detailing the state of her relationship with her husband and how she copes with being a mother. All the while, she is flitting back and forth through three generations of her family. In the end, she does manage to get her head together and to achieve some little peace of mind. Now that’s a rather boring, prosaic summary. I have deliberately used the word “prosaic” above because this novel reads almost like a poem. Intensity most often expresses itself poetically, and this is an intense novel.

The writing is superb, deep and earnest. There is simply not a word to spare. There is absolutely no way one could prune this novel back because every single word is apt and inevitable. In short, there is absolutely no padding in it, and moreover, it rings true to our experience. To use a phrase that is perhaps overused, I would describe this work as existential.  Existential philosophy, Iris Murdoch maintained, is a "lived in" philosophy because it deals with the actual daily concerns of the thinking, feeling and willing unity that every human being is.  Of course, thinking matters.  The Existentialists among us don't deny that, but we also factor in the real exigencies of feeling, willing or choosing - in short, all our human dimensions. 

No sooner do we start the novel than we are drawn into it: we begin to feel with, think with, live with, choose with, or choose not to choose with the author, and consequently we begin to experience with the narrator. She draws us into her head and into her heart. We become one with her in her quest - her quest for personal identity, her quest to make some sense of what this life is all about. Did the great existential therapist Viktor Frankl not put it well when he stated that "the meaning of life is to give life meaning"? This is surely one author's attempt at that task.

In short, this novel is a tour de force that ranges over the whole gamut of human experiences and emotions connected therewith: from birth to childhood, to adolescence and the burgeoning of sexual desire, to marriage, having children, the ups and downs of the married life, the ageing of the body and to death and dying. 

Plato maintained that meditation on death was at the heart of philosophy, as did a host of philosophers over the centuries.  Heidegger emphasised it over and over again in his writings. Professor Irvin Yalom, after reading this German philosopher, made the contemplation of our mortality one of the four "ultimate concerns" necessary to face the patient with in his understanding and practice of existential therapy.

This is an intense and stimulating novel. It disturbs and lifts the spirit in turns. You will take this novel in your hands at your own peril because it simply shakes you to the roots of your being and to the very foundations of your personality. But, my goodness, the challenge is worth it because you will leave this novel down all the better for having grappled for a while with the demons from your past. In short, you will be strengthened to attempt to face them head-on, and you know you will emerge therefrom a stronger character indeed. Now this is no self-help book in novel form - far from it. In fact, it is a disturbing book which persists in upturning all those mossy old stones of the past to reveal insects that wriggle underneath. 

However, the real meat of this novel, like all good novels, lies in its beauty and depth and precision of language. Anne Enright is a lyrical writer. She writes with a searing beauty and honesty of style. She carries us away with it, in fact. This truly is what makes a good writer - the ability to express things exceptionally well. Anne Enright has much of value to tell us - as indeed do most reflective and intelligent people, but Enright has the writer’s gift of expressing it so much better than the rest of us. In short, she has a lot of wisdom to share with us, and she shares it with us in a style of writing which is superb. In Enright’s hands, content and style rhyme, and she captures us with the resultant beauty of it all.

Another thing that moved me about this novel is the sheer honesty of the whole enterprise of good writing. Good writing is never for style's sake. Good writing is never fake or phoney. It is always honest and true. When style weaves into its unity such truth and honesty, then the result is often a masterpiece, and that’s what we have here in The Gathering. It is no wonder that this novel won the Man Booker Prize for 2007. The start of any novel or story is always worth reflecting on. Different authors have different ways of opening their works. Good authors capture our interest from the very beginning. The same is true of Anne Enright. I simply love the opening. It is mysterious and oblique and oh so honest. We can believe this narrator because she expresses her uncertainty from the beginning. In traditional novels, the narrator was often omniscient, and so when I studied English Literature all those years ago, this was called the All-Knowing Narrator. Our narrator is confused and searching. In short, she is an honest pilgrim. She is a searcher and explorer of life and experiences, as we all are. I’ll conclude this review by quoting several pieces of Enright's sublime prose that express many of the novel's central existential themes.

First, let me start with the opening paragraph:

(1) Opening Paragraph

 “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. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me - this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.” (The Gathering, Anne Enright, Vintage 2008, 1)

(2) The search for self in The Gathering 

With my psychologist’s or psychotherapist’s hat on, I wish to explore this novel exactly as a search for self-identity. However, as it is a work of art, it is at once that and so much more. To say that it is only a work exploring one's identity is, of course, to do a grave injustice to this lovely novel. A work of art or a work of the creative imagination is many things at one and the same time. In short, it is multidimensional. 

(3) Feelings of Grief at the loss of her brother Liam: 

"I think the following is a brilliant description of the effect the death of someone close can have on you: “I am a trembling mess from head to hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief which is almost genital.” (p. 7) 

(4) Love: “There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. 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. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.” (p.15) 

“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy - and we all do it, all the people beetling alone between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even though they are not there to love anymore. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.” (p. 28) 

(5) Death

“…this embarrassment of dead flesh, and the still breathing love that was in Ada’s body, a love that did not know where to go.” (p. 65) 

(6) On Old Age, Ageing and Mortality

“She knows because she is my Granny, and when she put her hand on my cheek I felt the nearness of death and was comforted by it. There is nothing as tentative as an old woman’s touch; as loving or as horrible.” (p.17) 

“There is something wonderful about death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest…” (p. 28)

“I look at my hands on the railings, and they are old, and my child-battered body, that I was proud of, in a way, for the new people that came out of it, just feeding the grave, just feeding the grave! I want to shout it at these strangers, as they pass…” (p. 79) 

“… she knows that growing old, with all its disappointments, does not suit Nugent.” (p. 135) 

“Rebecca comes back to me. Her face is full of unshed tears, and I take her outside the room for a minute. The other room is occupied by the coffin, so we have nowhere to go except the stairs, where we sit while my gentle, drifting daughter weeps in my lap for something she does not understand… She is insulted in her youth, by the proximity of death…” (p. 200) 

(7)Loveless Sex: 

“Tom had sex with me the night of the wake - as if Liam’s death had blown all the cobwebs away; the fuss and the kids and the big, busy job and the late nights spent strenuously not sleeping with other women. He was getting back to basics: telling me that he loved me…exercising his right. I love my husband, but I lay there with one leg either side of his dancing, country-boy hips, and I did not feel alive. I felt like a chicken when it is quartered.” (p. 40-41)

"The last time I touched him was the night of Liam’s wake. And I don’t know what is wrong with me since, but I do not believe in my husband’s body anymore.” (p. 73) 　 

(8) Strength to Cope with Life: 

On Liam‘s suicide: “He was a terrible messer. He was always full of it. He just couldn’t get it together. He had a good heart. He was always there. He was the best of company, we will say. Oh! But the wit. He had a tongue in his head, there’s no doubt about that. But he was very sensitive. It was a sensitivity thing with Liam. You wanted to look after him. He was not able for this world. Not really.” (p. 44) 

(9) Alcoholism: 

“I could smell the settler he had before he came in the hospital door. I could smell his lunchtime wine and last night’s beer. But there was also some metabolic shift, a sweetness to his blood and breath that I did not recognise. He didn’t eat much, those last years, his body already cycling on alcohol…” (p. 55) 

(10) Insanity: 

“The school was named for Dympna, an ancient Irish princess who refused to marry her father. When her mother the Queen died, Dympna’s father looked all over the kingdom but could not find a bride. Then his eyes lit upon his own daughter. Dympna escaped with her father-confessor, all the way to Belgium, where her father-the-king caught up with her and chopped her head off. What a fantastic story. St Dympna is the patron saint of the insane, Sister Benedict said, because her father was insane to want to marry her. Of course.” (p. 128) 

“There is a big white house on Lambay Island - Georgian at a guess, and worth gazillions. I saw it first, it must have been from the beach, the day we went with Ada, the day we went to visit our mad Uncle Brendan. And it kicks into me, this fact that Ada’s son lost to Largactyl and squalor. How many years of it? He probably died wondering who he actually was.” (p. 156) 

“We were always given to understand that our mother’s brother was too good for this world.” (p. 157) 

(11) Pain and Suffering: 

"Children do not understand pain; they experiment with it, but you could almost say that they don’t feel it, until they are grown. And even then, it seems, we always feel pain for the wrong thing. Or so it has been with me.” (p.129) 

Suicide: 

"Liam took his underpants off because they were not clean. He took his socks off because they were not clean. He probably thought, as the cold water flooded his shoes, cleansing thoughts.” (p. 142) 

“Your Uncle Liam was not old, Emily. He was sick. Do you hear me? Your Uncle Liam was sick, sick in the head.” (p. 175) 

Personal and National Shame: 

"My brother had strong ideas about justice, but he was unkind to every single person who tried to love him; mostly, and especially, to every woman he ever slept with, and still, after a lifetime of spreading the hurt around, he managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty. Now, why is that? This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family - a whole fucking country - drowning in shame.” (p. 168) 

Chaos and Chance: “This is what I sense as I look up the stairs to the room where we were all conceived: I sense the chaos of our fate - or not so much a chaos as a vagueness - the way that no one could find a groove. And I remember how proud we were. And how loyal. And the way we all stuck together. And wasn’t that just great!” (p. 187) 

Family 

"…My head twists away from whichever side of the church is more interested in my grief, only to show it to the other side. Here it is. The slow march of the remaining Hegartys. I don’t know what wound we are showing to them all, apart from the wound of family. Because, just at this moment, I find that being a part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.” ( p 191)