The Gathering

by Anne Enright

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn’t the drink that killed him – although that certainly helped – it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother’s house, in the winter of 1968.

The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

(From Publisher).

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the Rooney Prize, and three novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? – shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the Encore Award – and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004. The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize 2007.

The story is a banal one, a brother dies, a sister has to deal with the wake assignments including all the family member susceptibilities and yes, theirs is a buried past secret. However, the very precise way of using the very tenses to introduce us to the different times shows that this is a master work. As the story progresses, a feeling of loss is shared with the reader in those changes in timeline. At last, the description of the dynamics of the family membners, given little by little, page after page, in simple turning-point moments of their lives reveals a strong, vivid emotional story.

The curses and blessings of family secrets and psyches are fiercely but lyrically discovered and told.

Enright has a wonderful flair for wrestling humour form the darkest shore of family strife, abuse and regret, imbuing her narrator with an original and vivid voice. The memories and perhaps-imagined recollections evoked as the narrator tries to understand her brother's suicide are heightened by the author's sharp yet sympathetic focus on several generations of an upper middle class Irish family.