Death is expected in Irish narratives. Families in the double digits and a range of plights and despairs are familiar themes. Politics, religion and complicated sex are somehow fundamental fixtures. Anne Enright's fourth novel and 2007's winner of the Man Booker prize, "The Gathering," has these attributes imbued with an additional tone of subdued frenzy.
The novel circulates around the death of Liam Hegarty. There is a vague quality of mystery that surrounds his demise, an ambiguity which seems to have infused his life as well. Enright uses Veronica, his "Irish twin" (she is 11 months younger) to tell his story, which inevitably is the story of the Hegarty clan, and one inextricably linked to her own.
There is a blur between memory and belief, recollection and conjecture, which shapes "The Gathering" into a compelling and troublesome story of family. Veronica is faced with the repercussions of a muddled impropriety from the past and challenged with the present realities of her life as a mother and wife.
The path toward the truth behind Liam's life and Veronica's haunted attachment to him is circuitous. The narrative unravels a number of family yarns simultaneously as Veronica casts back decades and reconstructs the speculative, probable details of her grandmother's almost romance with a man who was not her grandfather. Entwined are her own complicated recollections of a period during which she, Liam and their sister Kitty inexplicably lived apart from her parents and her nine other siblings.
Veronica fulfills her familial role of responsible messenger in the wake of Liam's suicide, carrying the burden of her brother's death for her mother and her siblings. But as we are led to bear witness to Liam's funeral, Veronica drifts further from her present back toward the climax of the memory that binds her to her brother.
Liam's life is threaded with his connections to her, and theirs is inextricable from the story of her grandmother, Ada, and the man she didn't marry.
The sequences in which Veronica imagines Ada's past are lit with the faded sepia tones of speculation enhanced by romance. The tempered eroticism of the reconstructions of history is essential to the drive of the narrative.
Sex and death float near, and often on the surface of Enright's novel. Relationships are traced in smells and endings. The overlaps between the two assume an authority as part of the novel's purpose; limning the alarming eroticism of loss.
A large family, in the mind's eye, is often crowded with a frequent, jovial banter. Family dynamics escalate and devolve at such a fast pace that moments of drama assume a status of almost no account, acquiring an ordinary flavor in an environment saturated with emotion. But for every barbed remark there are one or two emotions kept quiet, a secret unwhispered for every scandal revealed. The quiet implosion of these privacies within a family is a feature of "The Gathering" that Enright delves into with fervor.
Enright enlivens every anecdote with a peculiar mystery. It is not the mystery of suspense, only the slow build-up of unexpressed emotion, the things unsaid. Happiness is a surprise. Grief is a staple; its presence is not so much unshakable as it is a flotation device.
Veronica loses sight of what her life is built upon and belittles herself for the margin of difference that separates her present from Liam's recent past.
The solitude that permeates Veronica's person is a kind of intoxication. She succumbs to the isolation of eerie midnight drives, her children and husband wrapped in sleep while she trolls the empty roads, her mind rolling, alone but for her conjectured recreations of the past.
This novel is shrouded in a murky mist; the subject demands as much. But depression is not a side-effect; Enright is too candid in her explorations for the weight of sentimentality. Family, death, sex and the convolutions of love are pertinent and Enright strips these emotions to their fundamentals.