***** Hollow Granny Sex Wins Prizes ***** (The Gathering - Anne Enright)

Member Name: malibu_jenny

Product:	The Gathering - Anne Enright
Date:	23/06/09 (216 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I can picture every scene.

Disadvantages: But they're all so bleak and drifting

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 to terms with her grief and facing up to her memories. This is not an easy book to read; relating to a large family and painful problems.

I imagine Veronica as a tragic heroine, staring out onto the grey Irish sea from a cliff top, pale and steely. For all the wrong reasons my mind paints her as a colder, more washed and worn Samantha Janus, but then this would be entirely in keeping with the author's description.

The large family mentioned begin as a focal point of the book, yet for all intensive purposes there might only be two other siblings for her. Looking back on her past from her present situation as wife and mother, she recalls being sent to live with her grandmother, Ada along with her sister Kitty and her brother Liam. Being close in age, Liam and Veronica are friends as much as siblings and aside from this revelation I struggled to identify with her.

If you come from a large Irish family, perhaps the book will strike a chord. From my perspective, the slightly frosty way Veronica viewed her family made her seem like an outsider looking in. Few of the descriptions were tinged with love; sometimes they seemed more like objective witness statements and often judgements. When you consider the descriptions of her family, it sits oddly with the way she always considers herself as part of a group identity rather than an individual and even when she throws light on her achievements, the husband, the daughters, the house, it is only as a comparison with her siblings.

There were some parts of the book I enjoyed and which still sing in my mind. An overload of descriptions occasionally made for tiring reading, but when it worked best, it really set the scene. The image of Veronica and Ada sat in the front room of the house, with the hair from Ada's brush sizziling as she flings it into the fireplace or the nowhere corner of Gatwick which masquerades as a Wetherspoons.

I am less keen on the back story; Veronica drafts and redrafts the story of how Ada (her Grandmother) met her husband Charlie and his friend Lambert - I see the point of this, she is trying to look back and justify the past, to give a reason why things have turned out as they have. To some extent she gives a bigger picture in doing so, she makes more sympathetic and rounded characters from the dead, she paints a history of her family, a love interest and a retrospection of life in Ireland. The flip side is that this story is less than believable. It seems questionable that anyone would pen a short story about their granny having sex.

Do I like Veronica? Not particularly, but by the end of the book I understood her. I started out wanting to know what had happened to Liam in the winter of 1968 to scar him so badly and turn him into the kind of hopeless sick man you push away on a drunken Saturday night or see getting beaten up by taxi drivers. What would bring him to weight his pockets with stones and wade into the sea?

I wanted to know and irritated by the drawn out story of Ada I almost flipped to the back to find out. Sticking with it, by the time the revelation came the dark ending was expected. As the story goes on, you suspect Veronica is only just piecing things together, the urgency dies and both you and she can wait for her to haul the suppressed memories into light.

There are enough twists and turns to keep you guessing, but sadly not enough to make you like her family or even to feel sorry for them. It's like the numbness of Liam's death has affected not just Veronica but the whole book, which overall, feels hollow and vague. You don't laugh or cry, instead you plod along like an observer, hazily feeling dislike for Kitty or worse still, nothing at all for Ada. If this was the intention, then it's perfectly captured. Even the love and hate her husband claimed to stir felt dispassionate. If you want emotion, vibrancy and colour you won't find it here.

Summary: It's more questions than answers. And maybe you don't want the answers.