Many of the people in the book groups I lead found THE GATHERING too dark for their tastes. Others loved it. If you like James Joyce, particularly THE DUBLINERS, I think you'll like it. I chose it and would again because as dark as it is, I found the Irish literary spirit running through it. I've included a review from the Washington Post.com, and at the end of the page a favorite short story of mine from THE DUBLINERS, "Eveline."

Harriet

Biography of Enright

Born in Dublin in 1962, Anne Enright was educated in Dublin, Canada and at the University of East Anglia, on the creative-writing MA course. For six years, she was a television producer in Dublin, and now broadcasts on RTE; she also writes for the London Review of Books and the Irish Times. She is married to the actor and director Martin Murphy; their children are aged four and seven. Her fiction includes the short stories of The Portable Virgin (which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature), and four novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and The Gathering (Cape), which this week won the Man Booker Prize. She has also published a non-fiction book on motherhood, Making Babies. She lives with her family in Bray, Co Wicklow.

Interview

Before leaving Dublin for London, she had duly told her two young children, "If Mama doesn't win the award, don't cry. It's not about winning. My daughter still isn't over the shock of sports day, which is the only competitive thing that happens in her school." Now, all that sensible parental advocacy of "It's the taking part" lies in ruins. " Unfortunately, that moral has been completely overturned." All the same, as she admits, "There was probably a little writerly monster in me that thought I was definitely going to do it."

"People in the business know how contingent and arbitrary the whole thing is," she adds, a sharp and mischievous presence even after four hours' sleep, and forever seeking the word and the idea that really fits the case. "The wider public sees it as a... transmogrification, as if it was somehow fated. That's not actually the case. But it is lovely to be lucky. I did always want to be lucky, and there have been times when I haven't felt lucky with books."

In fact, that writerly monster had good reasons for its confidence. Enright's fourth novel, The Gathering (Jonathan Cape, £12.99), overcomes the already-famous (or infamous) harshness of its material – suicide, abuse, quarrels, secrets and terrors passed down the generations of a fissiparous Irish clan like a cache of slow-ticking bombs – with the arresting and even exuberant precision of its art. Through the finely-tuned and often grimly comic first-person voice of her narrator Veronica Hegarty, as she returns to Dublin after the death of her brother Liam, Enright makes even this saddest of sagas sing.

She feels that, once they get to grips with the actual novel rather than its reputation, readers will be happy to ignore the deterrent "bleak, bleak, bleak" tag and appreciate the company of the uncontrolled and (often) savagely amusing Hegartys. "It's been selling very briskly in Ireland, and I just feel that word of mouth had a lot to do with that. It kept doing well, so I thought that people must be reading it and not throwing it across the room. I kind of trust this book a little more to make its way in the world, prizes notwithstanding.

Needless to say, Enright's novel is no sort of disguised confessional. In fact, she received a text from her sister which read: "Book very good and not overly autobiographical". And she compares the author's and the actor's art of honest fabrication. "We admire the generosity of actresses who bring a lot of themselves to their work, but we know it's not them."

The real Anne Enright lives in the pleasant (and pricey) seaside suburb of Bray, south of Dublin, is married to the actor and director Martin Murphy, and has two children, aged four and seven. She worked for several years as a producer of TV programmes for RTE in Dublin, and has also climbed that academic Parnassus of contemporary fiction, the MA writing course at UEA in Norwich. Whether writing a novel in celebration of the legendary tart from Cork who became the Eva Peron of Paraguay (The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch) or puncturing maternal myths in her book about motherhood, Making Babies, she has for a decade left a trail of broken taboos and slain sacred cows in her wake.

It all sounds much like a template for the modern Irish dream. Yet The Gathering shows in wrenching detail how the old Ireland haunts the new, just as the awesome figure of the grandmother, Ada, intrudes continually into the hearts and minds of her numerous and scattered tribe. "The novel is full of residues and ghosts, and things that don't go away," she comments. "Or, as they go away, they ossify... They turn kitsch and they turn dead."

The Gathering also pays unusually loving and lively attention to language, as shifting speech patterns over the past half-century mark the changing mental map of Irish people. That "the historical sections are refracted through various kinds of linguistic lenses", Enright explains, is " a reflection of the fact that you cannot write about Ireland in the 1950s in the same tone of voice even as you write about Ireland in the 1970s, or Ireland now. It actually requires a whole different language and sensibility, of flavour, tone and smell."

As the long-buried secrets of these decades come to light, a squalid and banal episode of sexual abuse almost inevitably features among them. Did she worry about the over-familiarity of this motif today? "I'm aware how jaded it is in novels in general," she replies, "and I'm also aware how important it is not to use what is a terrible human experience just for the sake of a book." Yet she also notes that "There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread, there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge... So I knew all of this. And I went there anyway."

She went there in part because, for an Irish woman writer even 45 years after Edna O'Brien's breakthrough novels, the right to such frankness still needs to be seized: "In some way, when I deal with sexual material, I feel that I'm reclaiming or repossessing some territory that's been taken away from women by male writers."

Moreover, her work investigates not just the how, but the why of storytelling: "I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from." However agonising, Veronica's urge to know and tell the truth at least tries to pin some solid meaning on the vagaries of her inchoate clan. "My impulse is towards the real," says Enright. "I do my best. And that is reflected in the process Veronica goes through."

As for the teeming tribe themselves, they "just came in under the radar. I was so busy working out what was true and not true in the historical sections, and so busy building the uncertainty into Veronica's thinking... that I just ignored the Hegartys. I know they are the heart of the book, and it's like my unconscious tricked me into being worried about other things." For her, "The Hegartys aren't so much dysfunctional as free-range. They just got on with it. They didn't really have their parents fucking them up in the classic sense. They were just ignored, essentially."

In the past, Enright herself has profited from the freedom of being (relatively) ignored. "To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy," she says. Later she adds aphoristically that "I always felt that if Ireland got it, the game would be over".

From now on, Ireland and whole world will claim to get it. "Ireland domesticates its writers very quickly," she says, mentioning one of her great predecessors in the unflinching scrutiny of its family life. " [John] McGahern is already somehow about the field. We've turned him into a man out walking in his field. He's an immensely angry, subversive writer, but somehow we've turned him into a rural idyll." Until now, "I've had a good run of not being domesticated because I haven't had a label slapped on to me... like 'Booker Prize'."

I suspect that no label will stick for long on Anne Enright. After all, this suddenly respectable literary champion has only just published (in the London Review of Books) a startlingly explicit piece on the "mass paranoia" that drives what millions think, or fantasise, about Kate and Gerry McCann. ("I realise that I am more afraid of murdering my children than I am of losing them to a random act of abduction," she wrote.) Discussing the McCanns' long ordeal by media and rumour, she now says that "A normal couple exposed to scrutiny can't survive. None of our lives would survive." Only via the artful candour of fiction such as hers, perhaps, can we safely meet the monsters on the hearth.

Biography and interview by Boyd Tomkin Independent.co.uk

Dubliners

An Irish woman tries to understand her wayward brother's suicide.

Reviewed by Peter BehrensSunday, October 21, 2007; Washington Post.com

THE GATHERING

By Anne Enright

There is something livid and much that is stunning about The Gathering, which deservedly won this year's Man Booker Prize. Anger brushes off every page, a species of rage that aches to confront silence and speak truth at last. The book's narrative tone echoes Joan Didion's furious, cool grief, but the richest comparison may be with James Joyce's Dubliners, of which the author, always his own best interlocutor, claimed, "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis."

Perhaps Anne Enright's novel is the Dubliners of the new millennium, even if she has not quite invented the wheel, stylistically and thematically, as Joyce did in his 1914 story collection. Both books are concerned with life now, though Joyce's now is turn-of-the-19th-century Dublin, whereas Enright's Dublin -- stainless steel Miele dishwashers, Saab 9-3s, small girls being raised on organic sausage and beans -- is pretty much current.

But it does seem clear that Enright's purpose is also to add a chapter to the moral history of her country. The Gathering tells a family story, which may be the best way to attempt such a thing. The story is grounded in the Ireland that invented itself sometime around 1985, when the emigration that had been paring the country down to its bones for 150 years started to slow and, eventually, reverse. More people speak Polish than Irish in the Republic these days, the population is inching up to its pre-famine level, and the girl pulling your pint in the terribly upscale bar at Dalkey has her MBA from the University of Ghent; the Irish have become attractively rich for the first time. Joyce wouldn't know the place.

The past used to weigh heavily on the Irish, perhaps because so little of the present was interesting. But Enright's Dublin is a technologically adept country spellbound by the speed of its own transformation, where citizens older than 40 feel antediluvian and try to conceal it by memorizing the names of important wines or taking golf vacations in South Carolina. These Dubliners are accustomed to urban sprawl, spellbinding real estate prices and self-contained children more familiar with the folkways of Orange County than those of County Mayo. The Republic has become postmodern and post-Catholic overnight, it seems, and the Irish are as confused as anyone by the way we, and they, live now.

The Gathering is a novel about memory: who did what to whom, who remembers the facts clearly and who doesn't. (Hardly anyone does, even the narrator.) Enright explores the tragedy of a brother's suicide by sorting through events that occurred, or did not, in a terraced house in the north Dublin suburb of Broadstone 'round about 1968. Or maybe it was in the garage; memory, Enright signals, is a painful, tricky thing.

Enright's Hegartys were once 12 brothers and sisters. The survivors are now in various stages of middle age. Her story builds around the recent death of an annoying, beloved brother, Liam, who has drowned by walking out into the sea at Brighton. Narrated by Liam's nearest-in-age sister, Veronica, who remembers persons and events that shaped her brother's unsatisfactory life, the novel is grounded in the weeks following Liam's death. And here there are certainly conscious echoes of earlier Irish fictions, where coffins, wakes and funeral masses figure so prominently. But Veronica's edginess keeps moving powerfully back to memories of the childhood and adolescence shared with Liam and all those others. She tries to unreel that fierce Irish silence that, with cups of strong tea, used to get everyone through, often at considerable psychological cost.

Everything that happens and does not happen here feels painfully and awkwardly true, even the notes of redemption. Enright seems to know the bone structure of the Irish family during its turbulent silence of the 1960s and '70s, when elders were still treated with fearful deference and children were less important than they are now, perhaps because there were so many of them and the houses were so tiny.

One last literary comparison suggests itself. Enright's Veronica -- Saab and all -- keeps banging into her Irish life, digging for a memory that will explain the inexplicable. In Alice Munro's brilliant, always surprising stories, provincial women, likewise raised to value silence, hold up stubborn candles and speak of matters not previously awarded language. In their own distractingly noisy way, the Irish have always been quite as silent as Munro's reserved Canadians, but now, it seems, is the time for talk. *

Peter Behrens is the author of "The Law of Dreams."

Eveline
by James Joyce (from The Dubliners)


SHE sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.

Few people passed. The man out of the last house passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there used to be a field there in which they used to play every evening with other people's children. Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it -- not like their little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play together in that field -- the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming. Still they seemed to have been rather happy then. Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother was alive. That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.

Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had been a school friend of her father. Whenever he showed the photograph to a visitor her father used to pass it with a casual word:

"He is in Melbourne now."

She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question. In her home anyway she had shelter and food; she had those whom she had known all her life about her. O course she had to work hard, both in the house and at business. What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out that she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. Miss Gavan would be glad. She had always had an edge on her, especially whenever there were people listening.

"Miss Hill, don't you see these ladies are waiting?"

"Look lively, Miss Hill, please."

She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.

But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married -- she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother's sake. And no she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages -- seven shillings -- and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father. He said she used to squander the money, that she had no head, that he wasn't going to give her his hard-earned money to throw about the streets, and much more, for he was usually fairly bad on Saturday night. In the end he would give her the money and ask her had she any intention of buying Sunday's dinner. Then she had to rush out as quickly as she could and do her marketing, holding her black leather purse tightly in her hand as she elbowed her way through the crowds and returning home late under her load of provisions. She had hard work to keep the house together and to see that the two young children who had been left to hr charge went to school regularly and got their meals regularly. It was hard work -- a hard life -- but now that she was about to leave it she did not find it a wholly undesirable life.

She was about to explore another life with Frank. Frank was very kind, manly, open-hearted. She was to go away with him by the night-boat to be his wife and to live with him in Buenos Ayres where he had a home waiting for her. How well she remembered the first time she had seen him; he was lodging in a house on the main road where she used to visit. It seemed a few weeks ago. He was standing at the gate, his peaked cap pushed back on his head and his hair tumbled forward over a face of bronze. Then they had come to know each other. He used to meet her outside the Stores every evening and see her home. He took her to see The Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him. He was awfully fond of music and sang a little. People knew that they were courting and, when he sang about the lass that loves a sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused. He used to call her Poppens out of fun. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow and then she had begun to like him. He had tales of distant countries. He had started as a deck boy at a pound a month on a ship of the Allan Line going out to Canada. He told her the names of the ships he had been on and the names of the different services. He had sailed through the Straits of Magellan and he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians. He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Ayres, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Of course, her father had found out the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.

"I know these sailor chaps," he said.

One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly.

The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the children laugh.

Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother's illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:

"Damned Italians! coming over here!"

As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on the very quick of her being -- that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:

"Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!"

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful whistle into the mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:

"Come!"

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

A Few Subjects to Think and Talk About when discussing THE GATHERING

characters and amosphere in Joyce's Dubliners, Brian Friels plays, other Irish literature and THE GATHERING

family, parents and siblings, what can be known and can't be, imagination, truth, death, forgiveness, redemption, humor, class and