Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A short-story dragged beyond its natural length, 17 Sep 2008
The Booker Prize is known as much for its occasional mis-fires as it is for recognising and rewarding brilliance. One thing's for sure; this 2007 winner is unlikely to trouble future compilers of 'Best of Booker' lists. In some ways it is surprising that it won simply because it is so close in its central themes to the winner two years before, John Banville's The Sea, which also deals with dysfunctional relationships, childhood memories, and the guilt and grief felt after a family death. But while Banville's book is a must-read masterpiece and worthy prize-winner; The Gathering is not...
This reader's frustration with The Gathering was amplified by the fact that it starts wonderfully and raises expectations to a level that it ultimately disappoints. There's no doubting Enright's 'technical' writing skills, and she has a particular way with metaphor, and a dark humour runs through her work. The opening chapter, only two pages long, is brilliant, setting the scene, establishing intrigue and a sense of dread - what memories, however uncertain, will the narrator invoke?
The novel reaches its high-point in Chapter 2 as the narrator goes to break the news of her brother's death to her sainted mother, and this big, brawling Irish family's history begins to spill out and show its cracks. But from here, as Enright has her narrator imagining - in endless detail - the lives and thoughts of her grandparents' generation and the hazy memories from her own childhood, in order to bring sense to her own situation now, the book begins to suffer seriously from being over-written and a complete loss of narrative momentum. At only 250 pages, the book feels twice as long, and comes across as a good short-story that's been stretched un-naturally to fit a novel's form.
While the book is essentially an exploration of uncertainty and memory, and how family history defines the self, I feel that Enright uses this to get away with some lazy thinking. For example, we are asked to accept that the brother's suicide was an absolutely inevitable outcome stemming from the abuse he suffered as a child. Really? An exploration of why some children 'survive' abuse and others don't, might have been more helpful - what else was in Liam's pysche that drove him into a life as an alcoholic drifter? Was that as responsible for his death as what happened to him as child? Enright's abstract and experimental style seems to imply that this doesn't matter, it's not really what the book is 'about' anyway, which is true enough but seems like a cop-out to me.
While none of Enright's characters, including the narrator, are exactly sympathetic, the men are particularly unpleasant and to my mind close to an easy stereotype. Enright is too artful to write that she thinks men are essentially rather thick and emotionally one-dimensional beings, led not by their brains but by what's in their trousers, but that's clearly her view based on the characterisations here. Sex is a heavy underlying theme, in Enright's view an elemental force that drives us to do things we would rather not do, and at no point is it suggested that to be human is actually to have the intelligence and will-power to overcome animal instincts. This leaves the book with a rather depressing, fatalistic taint, and the ending, where a glimmer of hope is offered to narrator Veronica, seems a slightly artificial 'Hollywood-ending' and at odds with everything that's gone before.
Oh well, not a disaster then, because of the quality of the writing, but certainly not a high-point in the Booker Prize's chequered history.
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221 of 263 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Boring, 23 Aug 2007
Words almost fail me when describing how boring I found The Gathering.
The basic premise is that the Hegarty family, both numerous and Irish, is gathering for the funeral of one of the siblings - Liam - who it seems had a bit of a drink problem and drowned himself in the sea at Brighton. The novel is narrated by Liam's sister Veronica who was, we are told, close in age and also in affection.
The problem is that the family is intensely boring. There is nothing to make us actually care about any of them. They seem not to have any depth of personality and there is no attempt made at character development as Liam and Veronica's history is outlined. Neither do we see much in the way of story. We have to take Veronica's word for the close bond between herself and Liam - we see little more than an escapade at the bus station by way of example.
We are then asked to believe - in the novel's moment of drama - that Liam's problems arose from his abuse at the hands of Lambert Nugent, the spurned lover of his grandmother. However, the depth of Liam's problems are not properly explored, and no real attempt is made to link a change in behaviour to the event in question. Moreover, the nature of the abuse is hardly the most serious abuse known to man. Of course, this doesn't mean that it couldn't have affected Liam in a big way, but Anne Enright doesn't show us one way or another. Indeed, later on in the novel, she explains that nothing can be proven by way of cause and effect.
Then, we have Veronica's own issues. She has decided, for reasons that bored me, to call a temporary halt in conjugal relations with her husband. So what? The soul searching - navel gazing? - that comes on the back of this is the essence of tedium.
And despite not having a personality, Veronica seems terribly obsessed with herself. The count of "I" on each page is high. We have lines like, and I paraphrase, I knew immediately that it was me she had come to speak to... We have self conscious moments where Veronica has to turn her head away from whichever side of the room seemed to be looking at her most closely. Yet this is not played as neurosis - it seems to be a straight affirmation that Veronica is the star of the show. But the reason for this remains obscure.
There is some slight intrigue in the relationship between the grandmother, Ada, her husband Charlie and her spurned admirer Lambert. But this comes as too little, too late. By that point, it has all become words on a page. There is nothing to draw the reader into caring for the Hegarty family as people. Just the ever increasing wish that it would end.
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19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Imagining The Truth, 24 April 2008
I read this book in snatches while on holiday and found it moving and literary, without being pretentious.
Traumatised by the death of her brother Liam's suicide, Veronica trys to make sense of what has happened and come to terms with her own reactions and emotions, by raking over the past. In contrast to many other novels, in which history is communicated as a set of unambiguous facts, whose significance is readily apparent, it is explicit in The Gathering, and clear to Veronica herself, that she can only piece together her family's story through substantial recourse to her own imagination. This is not simply a story that can be told, it is a story that needs to be created by the central character. Factual evidence is thin on the ground and her own memory and interpretation of the past is partial and fractured - Veronica is acutely aware of this but refuses to settle for a half baked truth. Eventually her persistence results in a story that she believes in and her grief can then take proper form.
The story is melancholy, edgy and funny. Veronica is a capable, multi-dimensional central character, who plays many roles in her respectable, middle-class life: her inner-life reveals the true depth and fragility of human existence.
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