The Gathering (2007)
Who wrote it?
Anne Enright (1962-; active 1991-), born Dublin, Ireland. After studying in Canada for two years, Enright did a BA in English and Philosophy at Trinity College, and subsequently the UEA's famed Creative Writing Course, where she studied under Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury.
She began her career as a TV producer and director for RTE in Dublin, before a breakdown caused her to step back and focus full time on her writing. Her first publication was a collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin, with her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, following in 1995. The Gathering was her fourth novel, and thus far only to be shortlisted for the Booker.
Aside from her fiction, she has also written frequent columns and articles for The New Yorker, running into some controversy in her Booker-winning year for an article on the McCann family. Her writing is frequently focused on family and motherhood, and she published a collection of essay on the latter in 2004, entitled Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. In 2015 she was appointed the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, and more recently was longlisted for the Women's Prize in 2020 for her seventh novel Actress.
What's it about?
The Gathering is told from the perspective of a 39-year-old Irish mother, Veronica Hegarty, who is one of a family of twelve siblings. It focuses on the funeral and wake of her closest brother, Liam, who has recently taken his own life in the sea at Brighton.
The first part of the novel largely focuses on the present-day emotional state of Veronica, saddled with the burden of arranging the funeral while dealing with a failing relationship with her careerist and cheating husband, while flashing back to experiences years before, largely centred on the family's grandmother Ada and her relationships.
It builds to mid-novel climax where the roots of Liams's (and Veronica's) trauma are revealed. The remainder of the novel focuses more on the titualar "Gathering" itself, as the majority of the surviving siblings come together to process, or perhaps avoid processing, the tragedy, and make sense of the complex web of relationships that makes up the Hegarty family.
What I liked
I loved the energy and personality of the writing. Told entirely in Veronica’s words, her voice is at once desperate and disconsolate, and filled with wry and very dry humour. Its momentum carries you on through what’s otherwise quite a threadbare narrative.
Veronica’s nocturnal life, filled with bottles of 4am red wine and (occasionally concurrent) aimless drives through the darkness, is a powerful way of exploring her dislocation and increasing detachment from reality, particularly as a mother. While very different in some ways, it reminded me slightly of Celia Fremlin’s The Hours Before Dawn in these passages - and that’s a compliment, for sure.
The husband is a truly impressively repulsive character.
While few are explored in much depth, the range of characters in the Hegarty family was certainly entertaining and intriguing.
What I didn’t like
I found it a bit lacking as a story. Like The Sea, a couple of years back, it takes place mostly in the realms of a single person’s inner reactions to a past trauma, and as a result there’s little narrative thrust to it. It’s an intriguing place to hang out for a while, but at the end of it it’s hard to feel like much has really happened.
The reveal of the central trauma, while powerfully handled, was simultaneously a bit of a predictable anticlimax. I was pretty glad that it came earlier in the novel than I was expecting, as if it had been held back until the end, it would have been even less satisfying.
I found some of the storytelling around the past a little unconvincing. I wasn’t ever really sure where Veronica (in whose voice we hear these recollections) was supposed to have got all the intimate knowledge of her grandmother’s relationships. Maybe I’m missing the point?
I guess I also felt a bit unsatisfied about the amount of time and attention given to Liam’s experience. While it’s Veronica’s story, and it’s obvious how his trauma and her role as sole bearer of the knowledge of it, has clearly impacted her life in many ways, it would also have been interesting to get more than a few glimpses of Liam’s own inner life.
Food & drink pairings
4am red wines.
Supermarket nibbles.
Fun facts
Some reports at the time suggested Enright was another one of those compromise winners, born of a jury “hopelessly divided” over Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Judge Giles Foden seems to disagree, suggesting proceedings were civil, and that while arguments were had, they were “with dignity” and most of the disagreement was over the shortlist selection.
Foden reserved his snark not for his fellow judges but for, well, everyone else:
“PS: note to publishers, try not to write call-in letters with spelling mistakes, or one that make foolish claims. Some of these letters looked as if they were written in haste. Then again, so did some of the novels submitted.”
McEwan’s book was certainly the bookies’ favourite, by some distance. Some literary critics were less convinced though. Why? Too short, apparently. At around 40,000 words, some grumbled that it wasn’t actually a novel, but a novella. All of which proves that this was probably a bit of a quiet news year overall for the Booker…
Vanquished Foes
Nicola Barker (Darkmans)
Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist)
Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip)
Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)
Indra Sinha (Animal's People)
Not one where I’ve read a lot of these. I don’t think Chesil Beach is one of the many McEwans I read back in the day, but they do blur into one somewhat. Any tips from this list?
The 2007 Orange/Women's Prize went to Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, against a strong shortlist including the previous year’s Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.
Context
In 2007:
Bulgaria and Romania join the EU, and Slovenia joins the Eurozone
Treaty of Lisbon is signed by members states of European Union
Virginia Tech Shooting - the deadliest school shooting in US history
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, along with 20 other people, at an election rally in Rawalpindi
Disappearance of British child Madeleine McCann in Portugal - case remains unsolved
WikiLeaks leaks the standard US army protocol at Guantanamo Bay
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner becomes the first female President of Argentina
Cyclone Sidr hits Bangladesh killing an estimated 15,000 people
Live Earth concerts for environmental awareness
HS1 train from London to the Channel Tunnel opens to public
First iPhone launched and released
Launch of Tumblr
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (final book in the series)
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
No Country For Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Atonement (movie)
Juno
Kanye West, Graduation
Radiohead, In Rainbows
LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver
Life Lessons
Don’t drink and drive, folks. Actually, Veronica seems to get away with it so maybe not?
Families: who’d have ‘em?
Memory: it is unreliable.
Score
7.5
It’s a powerfully written book with a unique voice. Very much readworthy, but also possibly a little on the forgettable side.
Ranking to date:
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) - 9.5
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (1981) - 9.5
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee (1999) - 9.5
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (2004) - 9
Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively (1987) - 9
Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth (1992) - 9
Oscar & Lucinda - Peter Carey (1988) - 9
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch (1978) - 9
Life & Times of Michael K. - J. M. Coetzee (1983) - 9
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy (1997) - 9
Schindler’s Ark - Thomas Keneally (1982) - 9
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai (2006) - 9
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (2002) - 8.5
The Bone People - Keri Hulme (1985) - 8.5
How Late it Was, How Late - James Kelman (1994) - 8.5
Troubles - J.G. Farrell (1970, "Lost Booker") - 8.5
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (2000) - 8
Possession - A. S. Byatt (1990) - 8
Saville - David Storey (1976) - 8
The Sea - John Banville (2005) - 8
The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell (1973) - 8
Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre (2003) - 7.5
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje (1992) - 7.5
Rites of Passage - William Golding (1980) - 7.5
The Gathering - Anne Enright (2007) - 7.5
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey (2001) - 7.5
Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald (1979) - 7.5
Last Orders - Graham Swift (1996) - 7
The Elected Member - Bernice Rubens (1970) - 7
The Conservationist - Nadine Gordimer (1974) - 7
Holiday - Stanley Middleton (1974) - 7
Heat & Dust - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) - 6.5
In a Free State* - V.S. Naipaul (1971) - 6.5
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle (1993) - 6
G. - John Berger (1972) - 6
The Famished Road - Ben Okri (1991) - 6
Something to Answer For - P. H. Newby (1969) - 5.5
The Ghost Road** - Pat Barker (1995) - 5.5
Staying On - Paul Scott (1977) - 5
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan (1998) - 5
Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner (1984) - 4.5
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis (1986) - 4
*Read in later condensed edition.
**Third part of a trilogy of which I hadn’t read pts 1&2
Next up
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, 2008’s winner and a continuation of the literary bat-and-ball between Ireland and India.
