Anne Enright
Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, The Gathering by Anne Enright opens with Veronica Hegarty receiving news of the suicide of her brother, Liam. In first-person voice, Veronica dips in and out of the past and the present as she struggles to come to terms with her brother’s suicide. She is one of nine surviving siblings.
The setting is Ireland. The technique is stream of consciousness. Veronica is tasked with retrieving her brother’s body from Brighton for burial in Dublin. She reminisces about the past, providing snippets of information about growing up in a noisy Irish household bursting at the seams with children. In order to understand Liam’s suicide, she delves further back into the past, even fabricating an elaborate scenario of her grandmother’s courtship and marriage to the man who was to become her grandfather. In the process, she includes a profile of Lamb Nugent, a man who was in love with her grandmother and who frequently visited her grandparents. Half way into the novel, we are told she witnesses a scene (or thinks she did) between Nugent and Liam at her grandparents’ home. Her memory is foggy because she is eight years old at the time. But she hovers around the scene, wondering if the impact of what may have happened on that day eventually drove Liam to suicide. She feels she owes it to Liam to understand his action and to acknowledge his past struggles.
Liam’s death serves as the catalyst for Veronica to explore her childhood and to articulate the tensions she feels in her role as a wife and a mother. She is unflinchingly honest and can be harsh in describing her relationship with her husband and two young daughters. When her siblings emerge from different corners of the globe to gather in their mother’s home for Liam’s funeral, she scrutinizes them under a microscope. Their communication is stymied by a fierce determination to project the appearance of normalcy and by a desire to shelter their mother from hurt. So much of how Veronica views her siblings is derived from how she saw them as children.
Veronica’s reminiscences illustrate the problems with memory. She recalls an event and then back pedals to suggest it didn’t actually happen that way, or maybe it happened somewhere else or to someone else, or maybe it’s just possible that it did happen the way she recalls. Her struggle to understand the present by examining the past is on shaky grounds, at best. There is too much ambiguity for any definitive answers.
The novel stitches together bits and pieces of memory, imagined histories, reflections on the present, and attempts to deconstruct the past. The writing effectively draws the reader into Veronica’s interiority as she hobbles toward an understanding of what, how, and why the present is the way it is. In the process, Enright provides a powerful portrait of a large Irish family with its bonds and encumbrances that both link and distance family members from one another.