The Booker Prize shortlisted "The Green Road" (2015) has been my only experience of Irish author Anne Enright thus far. I really enjoyed it as a book "full of moments-vignettes of excellent writing of coping with the complexities and tensions of life." This, somewhat understated new work offers more of the same.
We meet three generations of a family, working backwards in interspersed narratives. We begin with Nell, who, in her first-person account is somewhat lost, whose way of making it involves her staying at home, producing content for an influencer with a very different life to her own, attempting poetry and navigating an awkward relationship with a man with such poor communication skills he takes her to his brother's child's baptism without even mentioning it to her beforehand. Nell's self-obsession is in direct contrast to her mother who thinks the recipe for a problem-free life is not to think about yourself. I liked Carmel very much, especially when seen through the eye of her daughter. She loses a little of her spark in her own sections, a third-person narrative, yet is really fleshed out as a character.
The presence that hovers over these is Carmel's father, Phil McDaragh, a notable poet who continues to mine his Irish background when he has abandoned his family and lives abroad with a much younger wife. I didn't enjoy his first-person narrative as much as the others- there's also, and if you are as squeamish about such things as I am, then I feel I need to give you fair warning, a scene with dogs and badgers I found difficult to read.
Irish writers seem to really get the pull of home and family and the difficult relationship to be had with both. Nell needs to get away, almost as far as possible, but what she really needs is someone to communicate with, in short supply in the modern world. Carmel is a character who does well for herself yet she is rooted in the mundane details of domestic life. Phil has also burned brightly, his post-abandonment career which seems him celebrated on American television, a relationship with a volatile gifted poet in Mykonos are mentioned pretty much in passing as he too is fixated on his upbringing, using the wife he deserted as a muse long after the separation.
We get examples of Phil's creative output along the way, which personally did nothing for me but I can see its significance within the framework of the text. This book makes me keen to discover Anne Enright's backlist. I have an unread copy of "The Actress" on my shelves which I feel like I've been highlighting as a book I've wanted to read since publication and there's her 2017 Booker Winning "The Gathering" as starting points. It feels good to read her again.
The Wren, The Wren is published by Jonathan Cape on 31st August 2023. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.
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