The Gathering [Paperback]

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.

I was always unwilling to align myself with the `Booker bashers' for I was convinced that the much-debated literary prize surely attracted the most accomplished fictional works currently being penned in English. I was right, of course, but having now read 13 winners and a number of short- and long-listed works I can only conclude that, as in all other spheres of human endeavour, mediocrity dominates and brilliance shines inevitably but rarely. For me, Anne Enright's rambling sexual history of a dysfunctional clan of Dubliners falls squarely in the mediocre category.
At the funeral of alcoholic Liam Hegarty who has drowned off the coast of Brighton, his sister Veronica probes the past for clues as to what really set in motion her brother's decline and demise. Equipped with a memory as dysfunctional as her family she uncovers (fantasises?) sordid goings on in previous generations and, despite the fact that her grandmother was a whore and some of the others possess the morality of garden frogs, the `revelation' when it arrives hardly seems an event likely to traumatise one of the Hegarty clan. Seesawing back and forth in time and between reality and fantasy, and replete with gratuitous and almost slapstick sexual descriptions, irritating single word sentences and single sentence paragraphs, the narrative becomes pretty confusing and none too interesting. Frankly, none of the characters are thinking human beings. As we learn more about their genitalia than their emotions (not surprising as that seems to be where their brains reside), it is difficult to care much about what happens and to whom (and nothing much does happen). It is not that The Gathering is a bad book, more that in the end it does not amount to much.

One of the pleasures of being in a book group is that you find yourself forced to read books you never would have otherwise tried, and as a result, sometimes discover a wonderful work (one such example in my case is Jose Saramago's Blindness). However, the evil twin of that pleasure is the unmitigated pain of wasting precious time slogging through something you can't stand. Unfortunately, not only does this Booker Prize-winner stand firmly in that second category, it is the champion of it: the most hated book of the 70+ I've read for my bookclub, and the least enjoyable work of fiction I've read this year (out of roughly 100 or so books).

Unlike many other haters of this tedious book, I didn't find it particularly difficult reading. The unannounced shifts back and forth in time and place didn't leave me adrift so much as amazed at their clumsiness. Then again, the book is essentially a monologue of remembrance, and human memories are messy things, so I was willing to conditionally accept that messiness as part and parcel of the protagonist. Speaking of the protagonist (middle-aged Veronica Hegerty), many haters seem to focus on her unlikability as the source of the book's problems. Personally, I don't think that a protagonist needs to be likable in any way -- just interesting. But she's not interesting in the slightest, just (like the book itself), annoyingly self-indulgent. I suppose this could be construed as a kind of commentary on her yuppiesh generation, but that seems like grasping at straws. Moreover, there are no other characters to connect with. The entire story takes place within Veronica's head, and even though it's populated with various family members who allegedly mean so much to her (in a love/hate way), the reader never gets a sense of any of them.

The plot -- such as it is -- revolves around the suicide of one of Veronica's brothers, which sends her on a trip to Brighton to bring the body back to Ireland for the funeral (she is gathering the body to bring it back to a gathering of people -- clever). About halfway into the book the "secret" of this brother's lifelong depression is revealed, and it's both jaw-droppingly cliched and wholly simplistic and reductionist. My one hope was that this "revelation" would be the spark that lit a fire under the second half of the book -- but no, it simply plods forward at the same stultifying pace. Ultimately the book has nothing to offer: it has no telling insights into memory or regret, it rehashes the same tired cliches about growing up poor and Irish, its use of the unreliable narrator is rudimentary at best, and its not even notably bleak and depressing. I guess you could make the argument that many of these flaws are actually commentary on the flawed nature of humans, but this doesn't make it worth spending your own precious time on.