The Gathering

Despite having won The Booker Prize last year, I have avoided this book. Everyone I know who read it told me they hated it or that it was hard going, and even the Booker Prize chair called it bleak. I notice on Amazon it only gets 2 1/2 stars from readers. I also find Anne Enright's occasional Guardian Review column rather pretentious. But a friend gave it to me recently, so I thought, OK I'll have a go, and it is brilliant.

It is, however, unquestionably bleak. The narrator is angry, dissatisfied Veronica, one of a dozen Hegarty children. A Dublin housewife and mother, she is mourning the recent suicide of her beloved brother Liam. Liam was an alcoholic and a “terrible messer” who put rocks in his pockets and slipped into the sea at Brighton. In trying to deal with Liam's death, her relationship with her "vague" mother and her collapsing marriage, Veronica begins drinking heavily and thinking obsessively back to some dark secret in her, and her brother's, past.

So, yeah, on the surface bleak. But the whole thing doesn't crash down on the reader's head, mainly because of Enright's prose, which is merciless, hard, yet there is tremendous beauty in the spareness—and humanity.

Despite what Derridean deconstructualists might say, we don't read in isolation; when in your life you read a book is just as important as anything. I read this just after I came home from the States visiting the home of my two elderly parents. I could almost feel death there, sitting on one of the side chairs at dinner, hovering while my father watches TV. A clear-eyed, unflinching yet ultimately full of compassion book about love and death and dysfunction quite frankly floored me.