The Wren, The Wren (2023)

Why this one?

Having read a selection from the 2024 Women’s Prize Longlist, I”m now making my way through the final couple of books on the 2024 Shortlist, of which this is one.

Anne Enright (1962-; active 1991-) was born in Dublin, Ireland. After studying in Canada for two years, she 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, her fourth novel, won the 2007 Booker Prize.

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. The Wren, The Wren has already won the Writers’ Prize ( FKA Rathbones Folio Prize), voted for by the Folio academy of more than 350 fellow writers.

Thoughts, etc.

The Wren, The Wren is told from the perspective of three members of the same family. We begin from the perspective of Nell, a student and latterly author of clickbait-y online journalism, who is keen to break away from her claustrophobic relationship with her mother. This perspective alternates through most of the book with that of her mother Carmel, who has raised Nell alone after a brief affair. Looming over them both is the long shadow of Carmel’s poet father Phil., a womaniser who channels most of hs useful energy into poetry and otherwise appears as something of a moral and emotional vaccum. His nature-focused poems are dotted through the book, and we also get one chapter from his perspective towards the end.

I’ve purposefully kept the summary rather brief as this isn’t a particularly plot-driven novel. There are certainly sections of it in which things very much happen - typically these are sudden bursts of violence, rage or both. But there’s little order to this novel, it jumps both perspective and time period in a way that will no doubt be engrossing to some and a little infuriating to others. Within all of that there is some predictably fine writing and a lot of individual moments to ponder on. Relationships of a romantic/sexual nature in the book are universally unsatisfying - generally ending in abusive violence, abandonment, or a general drift of pointlessness.

The book is more concerned with family bonds, or lack of. There’s a kind of desperate and tragic familial pull that maintains connections between the primary characters or their surviving partners / other relatives but even these relationships seem to lack any real redeeming qualities - they’re posited as necessary and inevitable bonds, with some doomed quality to them but if they represent love, it’s of a very peculiar and unsatisfying kind.

The poetry featured throughout feels authentic, and is pleasant and occasionally poignant. But it’s ultimately a repository of sadness, a substitute for its fictional author’s need to connect emotionally with his own family, escaping instead into words and a succession of flings.

I do think this is a book that will connect with a lot of people. Like most of this year’s shortlist it engages head-on with the myriad and depressing challenges women face. It’s beautifully crafted and with moments that really stick in the memory. However, it’s a gnarly sort of thing: a book that challenges you to wrestle with its ideas rather than presenting you with a straightforward narrative or message.

Score

7

I’m far from surprised that this book won a prize voted for by writers. It’s a very writerly read, and that’s where - for me, in my current frame of mind, at least - it fell down a little. I absorbed it slowly over a few weeks, which contributed I think to a patchy and fragmentary impression. It’s probably a book that should be consumed whole, and then ideally reread to pick up all of its connections. Not a bad book by any stretch, but not a hugely satisfying one for me.

Next up

One last shortlist read in the shape of Brotherless Night, before I move onto something else…