Anne Enright: "The Gathering"

I've been putting off writing this review for quite some time now and I can see that it's been more than a week since my last entry was placed here. There is a good reason for this delay: I have very ambivalent feelings about Anne Enright's The Gathering. Consequently, the fact that the book is the 2007 Booker Prize winner, which suggests that many literary-minded people have found unquestionable merits in it, is quite intimidating for someone whose reaction to the book is not so one hundred per cent positive.

A brief summary of the situation (it can only be brief since action-wise not much happens in the novel) could go as follows: the narrator's favorite brother Liam drowned himself in England, and the woman, 39-year-old Veronica, is grieving while waiting for his body to be brought for the funeral, which is an occasion for the titular gathering of the family at Liam's wake.

The title can however be understood as a commentary on what Veronica is doing throughout the narrative: she is collecting scattered bits and pieces of the past which she may or may not correctly remember. It seems that the trauma of the brother's suicide triggered some memories which she had pushed to the unconscious long before. She starts the narrative as follows: 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. Well, the crime that she is talking about so vaguely is an act of sexual abuse done to her nine-year-old brother which she accidentally witnessed. Yet, this recovered memory is not presented as sensational in the book, which actually is a big advantage - offering a gloomy vision of Irish life, Enright's novel is not cheaply thrilling at all.

When I was reading the book, I had a suspicion that the unveiling of the harm done to Liam was actually a cover story for something that may have happened to the narrator herself - something which she is unable to confront and name. What invites such a conclusion is her attitude to sex - although this narrative abounds in descriptions of sex, they can hardly be called sexy. She seems to display deep aversion to sex, for example, when writing about her big family: ...and there were pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit. The descriptions of her husband making sex to her (well, that 's what it boils down to in the story as she seems to loathe it) also suggest that she might have a problem with sex. And yet, she obsessively writes about it. Was Veronica sexually abused as a child? Or is she suffering from false memory syndrome?

The book is praised for its brilliant lyricism and eloquence - true. Once you get into it, you may yield to its charm. You will also get moved by the story itself, provided you are patient enough to get at least half way through. The point is that being so modernist in character (no chronology, fragmentation: jumping into the past and back to the present, stream of consciousness at times, focus on the psychology of the narrator) and because so little in it is certain, the novel is bound to quickly slip out of your head - after a month or two you'll hardly remember it at all. Well, lucky me I'm writing this blog - to remind myself I have read The Gathering.