The Gathering - Anne Enright

It's not difficult to see why Anne Enright's "The Gathering" has been short-listed (and eventually, selected) for that ultimate literary fiction accolade, the Man Booker prize. If our (or the jurors') idea of the the peaks of literary novel is, almost unavoidably, defined by the Great Moderns, if it's all of Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence; Proust and Kafka; then "The Gathering" had to be recognised because it's steeped in that tradition. Veronica Hegarty, one of the twelve Hegarty siblings is bringing her brother Liam home to bury. He walked to his death in the Brighton sea, his brain muddled by drink, his pockets filled with stones. The ...  Read the complete review

The Gathering is one of those books with a haunting cover and a grey blurb, promising something intangible and short enough to bear repeating here. "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.... It was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968". Had I written this description, the actual gathering of the family might not have featured, being so late and incomplete within the story as to be of less consequence than other events. I would perhaps instead tell you that this is the story of Veronica Hegarty, coming ...  Read the complete review

At a loss as to what to read next, I went in search of Man Booker Prize winners and found this one (from 2007) in the local library. The blurb describes it as a 'family epic', 'tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations', but at its heart is the story of one woman's inner turmoil, her scrambling through family history to find whatever it is that will help her to make sense of and then return to, the life from which she has become both physically and emotionally detached. In the review I wrote of the last book I read, Down River (John Hart), I said that I prefer less action and more emotion, character, prose. Well, I certainly got what I ...  Read the complete review

I bought this book because it won the Man Booker prize so thought it would make for good reading. I've now read it twice; I read it the second time to see if I missed something the first time and I'm afraid I don't think I did. I find it quite a pretentious book which is probably why it won the prize but in all honesty I've read far better books that have won nothing. Saying that, its not the worst book I've ever read either. Its....experimental? I'm not sure but here's my take on it. PLOT This is the thing that I thought I'd missed first time round. Because it doesn't appear to have one. The story is told in first person by Veronica Hegarty, whose huge ...  Read the complete review