The Weight of Two Beauties

There are some novels that hardly need a plot at all.  The writing in them is so good, and so exciting, that it is a justification in itself.  The Gathering, my fifth Booker shortlist read, is just such a book, and I loved it.  I couldn't imagine Darkmans having a rival for my affections at this late stage, but such is Anne Enright's novel.  Although, to be fair, they're such different creatures that it is hardly possible to make comparisons between them. How *do* the Booker judges do it?  Personally I would be paralysed by the choice I had to make.  How could I proritise the offbeat excess of the one, over the keen literaryness of the other, when both are so precisely and delightfully executed?  I'd combust.  (Incidentally, there is an Ani Difranco song, one of my favourites, that expresses this dilemma perfectly: 'but then what kind of scale compares the weight of two beauties, the gravity of duties or the ground speed of joy?')

The Gathering sounds like a proto-typical 'Irish' novel.  Veronica Hegarty is one of twelve siblings, the numerous offspring of a vague, depressive mother and a stern, insatiable father.  Now at the age of 39 - indifferently married to a successful businessman and with two daughters of her own - she is called upon to deal with the aftermath of the suicide of her alcoholic elder brother, Liam, a man she both loved and hated in equal measure.  As she arranges (and pays for) his wake and funeral, she begins to search for the causes of his death and to dig into the dark memories of their shared childhood. It becomes important for her to explain him, and through him, herself.  Using her professional skills as a writer - she once wrote for a 'home style' magazine - she begins to (re-)create the past in the present:

'The seeds of my brother's death were sown many years ago. The person who planted them is long dead - at least that's what I think.  So if I want to tell Liam's story then I have to start long before he was born.  And, in fact, this is the tale I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots.'

And so she spins a tale about her grandmother, Ada Merriman, her grandfather, Charlie Spillane and their mysterious old friend, Lambert Nugent.  She starts in the 1920s and makes it about love, picturing Ada choosing between the two men and in doing so tying herself to them both in a bizarre triangle of obligation and resentment.  She paints a beautiful, passionate picture of their young lives, as cinematic as any 1940s movie, although always with the caveat that none of it is true. She freely admits that: 'This is all romance.'  It is her way of slipping into Liam's past by the back door, and of explaining away what she observed as a child: the strange relationship between Ada and Lamb in middle age, and the continual absence of Charlie.  But it always clear that Veronica's story is not so much a love story, as it is a sex story.  Sex keeps breaking into her narrative, no matter how hard she tries to exclude it: she imagines her grandmother as a whore, pictures her in bed with Charlie, and grappling on the floor with Lamb.  All by the way of edging towards what she thinks she saw one day in her childhood - the nine year old Liam with his hand forced into Lamb Nugent's trousers.

Of course, she isn't a reliable narrator.  She says she is certain of what she saw, and then that she isn't:

...even though I know it is true that this happened, I do not know if I have the true picture in my mind's eye... The image has too much yellow light in it, there are too many long shadows thrown... I think it may be a false memory, because there is a terrible tangle of things that I have to fight through to get to it, in my head.  And also because it is unbearable.

And she admits that she would never have remembered it if: I hadn't been listening to the radio, and reading the paper, and hearing about what went on in schools and churches and in people's homes. I went on slap-bang in front of me and still I did not realise it.  It is difficult to know whether Liam was abused, or whether Veronica needs him to have been, in order to reconcile herself to his fate.  It is easier for her to believe that her brother was irreparably damaged by child abuse than that he was a drunk who, at the age of 40, had no hope left.   Because Veronica is an angry woman, and bitter.  She writes with an open and vitriolic fury that expresses any number of dissatisfactions that she feels about her life:

'So I am in a rage with every single one of my brothers and sisters, including Stevie, long dead, and Midge, recently dead, and I am boiling mad with Liam for being dead too, just now, when I need him most.  Quite literally, I am beyond myself.  I am so angry I have a second view of the kitchen, a high view, looking down...'

She is overcome with disgust for '...the living, with all their smells and holes. Liam was always a great man for people's holes, and who stuck what into which hole.'  She has everything she could ever want: a five-bedroomed house, a successful husband, two pretty-in-pink daughters and a Saab. She can buy anything she likes. There is a painfully funny moment in which she struggles to decide how many glass jars she needs to store the fashionable lentils that she never uses, before dashing out of the store in despair at herself. 

It becomes clear that it may be Veronica, rather than Liam, who was sexually abused by Nugent and that her storytelling is a process of transference.  Her attitude towards sex is desperately disturbed, and she finds it almost impossible to seperate healthy love-making from sordid fiddling. Watching her husband having an erotic dream, she imagines him abusing their own daughter:

'I turn around again and gather the covers about me, as the thing my husband is fucking in his sleep slowly recedes. A thing that might be me. Or it might not be me.  It might be Marilyn Monroe - dead or alive.  It might be a slippery, plastic kind of girl, or a woman he knows from work, or it might be a child - his own daughter, why not?  There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I am not sure what stops them when they wake.  I do not know how they draw a line.'

The fact that she can conceive of his fantasising about the rape of his own child says a great deal more about her own ruined psyche than his.  The idea of child abuse has become central to her being, a kind of retreat from her marital dissatisfaction and her distant relationship with her mother (who spends a good portion of the book forgetting her daughter's name).  It is as though the abuse gives her an identity, and also the reason to take it away:

'I add it in to my life, as an event, and I think, well yes, that might explain some things. I add it into my brother's life and it is crucial; it is a place where all cause meets all effect, the crux of the X.

Which is pretty much where the plot begins and ends; it is hardly ripe with revelation.  What it has instead is a canny prose, an exquisite way of inhabiting Veronica and all her neuroses, and turning them out like pockets.  Enright pitches the roar of her narrative so that it is full of something far more shocking than paedophilia: the momentous, cloying difficulty of thwarted sexuality.  It is the twin of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach in this regard although, I think, superior in that it gives the woman a voice to express her own difficulties and to make her own apologies.  Enright is funnier too, and more acidic than McEwan.  Veronica is delightfully waspish, for example, when confronting the economic facts of her life: 'But I don't think empires or cities or even five-bedroom detached houses are built on the sordid fact that people have sex, I think they are built on the sordid fact that people have mortgages.'  In the end it is this - the way that Enright has Veronica constantly touch base with reality - that gives the novel its real gritty flavour.  You know, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it won. The odds at the bookies are currently 15-1, the longest of the lot.  I might even put my money where my mouth is.

~~Victoria~~

Comments

[Becca Kerry]

You could bet, but I think you'd actually have to go into a bookie. :-{
I found The Gathering bleak, introspective, self-important(which of course it was meant to be), and I didn't warm to it. It reminded me of a recent read that I thought much superior - The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin.
Having read your review, I realize that there are some points that are excellent - the bits you've extracted are little nuggets of gold, and they make the book seem vivid - angry and insightful. But I also know that I found this a terribly dreary reading experience. No review from me, I think, because I'd have to re-read the book in order to understand it.

I'm not sure I follow the logic that it succeeds better than On Chesil Beach because it presents the view of the woman. It seems to me that Tom, here, is as equally maligned (if not more so) as Florence. Though perhaps it is easier to see through Veronica's bitterness and depression, to know that her words aren't a reliable description of the man they purport to describe, than it is to *see through* McEwan's narrative. McEwan is so much *in* On Chesil Beach that the thing becomes impossible to decode. Perhaps that's what you meant, or perhaps you are simply more interested in the female point of view?

Lovely review though. Glad you liked it. I'm sticking with Darkmans!

[kimbofo]

Wonderful review, and so much better than mine! I found this book grim and disturbing, but there was a part of me that loved it too. Enright really seems to have captured Veronica's dark mind so eloquently. I love that Veronica describes herself as a "good daughter" -- that she does all the right things on behalf of the family, looking after her mother, organising Liam's funeral etc -- but underneath she's seething with rage and confusion and, at times, doesn't really understand what's wrong with her. Like you pointed out, she's got a nice husband, two lovely daughters, a house in the suburbs etc, but she's not satisfied, and certainly not happy. Interesting that you think maybe she was the one that was abused...

[Nic]

Becca: I haven't read either book yet, but I'll have a go at responding anyway! As far as I can tell from reading Vicky's (and others') reviews, each book pivots on the interaction of sex and its female protagonist's psyche. Both are about a woman's distate for, or unwillingness to engage with, sex, yet while Enright lets Veronica tell/frame her own story, McEwan presents Florence from without rather than within.

With McEwan, though, I'm more than willing to imagine that this omission is the point: that we're supposed to wonder what Florence's problem is, and whether it is a 'problem' at all. So often in this type of story - and here I think the period in which it's set has to be significant - everything centres on the male perspective. The success or failure of a sexual situation is seen as resting on the abilities or proclivities of the man, with the woman as an adjunct to his narrative (whether as receiver, victim, or trigger - rarely initiator) without her own agency or desire. The experience is his; she is part of the scenery.

So Florence's silence may be deliberate... the real story is hers, but she isn't able to tell it?

(All of which is rather making me think of Tess and Angel ;-))

[Becca Kerry]

On Chesil Beach is balanced between the psyche of Edward and Florence. I believe that McEwan said that he wanted to give equal weight to both stories (and he does, through most of the novel), though when it came to revealing their future he felt he had to concentrate on one, and chose Edward, simply because he had to choose. That's a third-hand anecdote, though, so I might be misrepresenting.
They are very different novels, in just the way you suggest - Enright lets Veronica tell her story - indeed we suppose that it comes from her own pen. With McEwan, however, I think that there's something very tricky going on at the level of point of view. I blogged on it, but i didn't express it well enough:
http://beccadimery.squarespace.com/blog/2007/8/20/on-chesil-beach.html
McEwan seems to slip and slide between his own head and his characters' heads with very little signposting, and I think that it is a deliberate blurring of point of view and perception. At least I hope that it is.
McEwan is very much concerned with Florence's agency in the sexual situation, incidentally, so it might interest you to read the novel as a counterpoint to Tess of the D'Urbervilles! Where Florence is passive, she is very actively passive, if that makes any kind of sense. She's not an everywoman figure, though - she has a very definite problem, it seems.
I think you're exactly right in summing up the difference between my preference and Victoria's. The Gathering is very much an interior novel, and On Chesil Beach is an exterior one. I normally prefer the former, but not in this case! I didn't mean to fling that penultimate line 'Perhaps you are simply more interested...' out like a criticism, though - hope it didnt come across that way.

[Becca Kerry]

Hmmph, Tess and Angel. I do like playing Devil's Advocate, and so I enjoyed supporting Angel in class, but needless to say, I've grown up a bit since then and my sympathies for him have waned a little!

[hobgoblin]

I'm coming to your review late, since I just last week read Enright's novel. You perfectly express my feelings for the book--I was the only one in my book group who really loved it. Your explanation of Veronica's frustrated anger illuminates my own sense of the narrative's power. Thanks for a great review.