The Gathering by Anne Enright
"I think we make for peculiar refugees, running from our own blood, or towards our own blood."
The Gathering is an extremely dark reflection of the protagonist's insecurities, especially guilt after the suicide of Liam, her closest brother in age and affections. The experience unsettles Veronica who plunges into the depths of despair and misery. It is a difficult book to read because it shows the disintegration of the human psyche through bereavement and what we are left with is the guilt and remorse. It contains many emotional truths which your average reader will find uncomfortable and distressing.
Enright won the Booker Man prize for this novel and yet many reviewers have been extremely critical of the book. I suspect that it is the worrying veil of darkness that hovers from start to finish. What I find interesting is the diversity of reactions but isn't that the whole point of reading and reviewing? Wouldn't it be tedious if we always agreed?
As siblings Veronica and Liam were close during their childhood shared with ten other siblings living in close proximity to each other.
"I am the one who loved him most" she confesses although she grew to dislike him as an adult and because of her affluent lifestyle at the age of 39, she is the one who automatically pays for the funeral, identifies him and brings him home to rest in peace.
Liam's life was empty, meaningless and full of squalor and what a contrast with Veronica's grandeur. He was a "messer" and unreliable although his sister tells us he could be astute but simultaneously "blunderingly stupid." The demon that finally tempted fate was drink and he turned vicious when he'd been drinking. When sober, he would lose things or simply steal. And then it killed him.
He was constantly restless and unfit for the adult world metaphorically having been left behind as if he had been frozen in time, living permanently in the seventies. In all honesty, Veronica always knew that Liam wouldn't make it, that fate, for what it was worth, wasn't written in the stars, it was written in the body or the bones. It simply means that he was going to die young.
Liam was prone to boredom and decline, vague which seemed to be a Hegarty characteristic. Veronica chronicles the fated family going back to her maternal grandmother, Ada who she romanticises as pure and the things that poets wrote about but then distorts the poetical image, vulgarising her as if she was a whore. She blames Ada and how "each and everyone of her grandchildren went vaguely wrong," and questions why she brought so much death into the world then she retracts this blame.
She also blames her mother for this chaos and producing a dysfunctional family: 12 children, 7 miscarriages, condemning them as her helpless parents who "bred as naturally as they might shit!" And yet the complexity and ambivalence of her feelings come across:
"We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them."
His suicide has such a devastating effect on Veronica in that it brought home many painful truths about her own life, marriage and family, her own illusion of the middle class dream. Life was about choices. She could go home and pick up the pieces of her fractured, miserable life and pretend to be happy knowing that her daughters didn't need her or want her or even Tom, her husband. They would survive without her.
She visits old haunts during the night. drinking and driving trying to understand her own life and Liam's death.
Within the novel sexuality is warped and seen as un-natural. When Veronica comments on Ada she also refers to her beau, Nugent who carried a torch for her all of his sad life and she describes a sexual encounter that seems more pornographic than innocent that may or may not have taken place. It is this man who was responsible for damaging Liam thirty years ago, destroying his innocence and filling him with terror.
Veronica as an 8 year old, witnessed a scene which she could not comprehend as a child but which horrified her as an adult when she could!
After the funeral, she wants the family to know the truth that Liam was interfered with and this was the catalyst that sent him on a downward spiral on a course of self-destruction. As for the protagonist, she is unable to return to middle class suburbia and hovers around Gatwick airport in a state of limbo:
"I have been falling into my own life for months. And I am about to hit it now."
Her future seems as bleak as Liam's decision to end his life perhaps for similar reasons? But then, knowing how indecisive Veronica is, she could simply go back home. With Veronica you never quite know the outcome!
Publisher: Vintage Books. ISBN: 978-0-099-50163-3.
I think this review is an objective & revealing assessment and one that chooses to 'explain' rather than just criticize. A concise and informative summary of what is apparently a very emotive read.
ReplyDeleteThe comment was made by Clive Walker, writer
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