Dublin Opinion

While we should be delighted by the news last night that Anne Enright has won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering we should not automatically use it as a jingoistic expression of national pride. One can remember those absurd stories of parents who previously had no interested in Cricket rushing out to buy Cricketing kit for their kids (and being unable to find any) when Ireland sensationally beat Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup earlier in the year.

So if one’s breast swells with national pride because an Irish author has won a British fiction prize then you should ask yourself, prior to puffing ones chest out, how many of Anne Enright’s books you have read. Like me, probably none. Well I suppose literature is different to sports. Writers don’t need fans to cheer them on from the sideline. They sit in an over heated Convention hall in a crumpled dress or suit, nervously waiting with friends and family and the rest of us only find out about it afterwards.

The fact that she’s Irish though is our only general connection to her achievement and that she’s a woman writer is an added bonus – but both things, her Irishness and the fact that she’s a woman, don’t seem to have matter that much to Enright, at least not in the sense of being potential focal points for her writing. She, quite rightly, just considers herself a writer.

In one of her interview after the award she talked about how her novel The Gathering, reflected the ‘new’ Ireland – something the international press will, no doubt, continue to hark on about. ‘I’ve always been a modern girl’ she said, ‘and now Ireland is starting to catch up with me’.

I remember a Late Late Show in the 90s when they decided to dedicate it to the current status of Women in Ireland. Marian Finucane took over the chair from Gaybo for the evening and Nell McCafferty and Enright were brought on to represent the old school and new school of women in Ireland. There was a clip from an earlier show(from the early 70s I think) when Nell and the girls came down to Dublin on the Belfast train, waving packets of condoms out the windows as it pulled into Pearse Street station. There was much talk about how hard it was for women then to get a head.

After much talk they asked Enright for her point of view, representing as she did, the modern Irish woman. ‘I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about’ she said (or words to that effect). For her, as an RTE producer and a writer at the beginning of her career her, gender never got in the way of what she wanted to do.

That’s what I like about Enright. She doesn’t really worry about what everyone else thinks. Or rather she doesn’t worry about whether or not those within the society in which she lives and works agree with her own point of view. If they’ve got backward opinion about gender or about how society should work its not up to her to change their mind. Sometimes a country can contain citizens whose minds are larger and more outward looking than the parochial obsessions of the majority would suggest.

While many have focused on the national aspect of The Gathering – firstly as appears to subscribe to the clichés of Irish writing, drinking, sexual abuse, family, dynasties etc and secondly as reflecting a ‘new’ Ireland, as the main character Veronica lives a comfortable middle class life with her treasured Saab – Enright herself has suggested that it is more Greek than Irish, where the focus is on family ties, blood, connectedness, memory and the psychological catastrophe that only intra-family relations can generate.
On the first point, the clichés, it is something that the novel itself is aware of, but also points to the fact that many families often share the same twisted characteristics.

“There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends, of course, and, like trends, they shift. Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them.”

It’s a bit like the Philip Larkin line, except instead of your parents fucking you up, it’s the whole family, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, even uncles, or especially uncles in this case. Fucking you up is delegated out.

I haven’t read The Gathering yet. I had meant to, but yet have to get around to it. If I do get around to it soon it will be probably because she won the prize and the fact that she’s an Irish writer who beat Ian McEwan.

AL Kennedy has a good review here and Sinéad Gleeson has an excellent interview with her.

Photo courtesy of the Irish Times. I’ve written about Enright before.