‘The bishop came to bless the camera’

Anne Enright’s latest novel is caught between Catholic Ireland and Hollywood, finds Cal Revely-Calder

PACTRESS by Anne Enright 272pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99, ebook £9.99

eople in Anne Enright’s novels are forever chasing ghosts. Usually they’re haunted by a common catastrophe: being born to troubled parents, coming to sex the wrong way, having an affair that doesn’t go well. A typical Enright scene gives us, in the first person, a former child who’s padding around a faded family home, trying to figure out how to feel.

Actress is Enright’s seventh novel. It begins in a house in south-east London that our narrator Norah never knew. This is the birthplace of her mother, the late Katherine O’Dell, who was

“the most Irish actress in the world” and, thus, Norah reflects, not only “an artist, a rebel and a romantic” but, by dint of her English birth, “a great fake” on top of that.

Katherine was a “star of stage and screen”, moving in the same circles as Ivor Novello and Orson Welles. (They “did not use the word star” when Norah was growing up in Dublin, but there’s no question of that now.) She was triumphant through the late

Forties and Fifties, acting in London and New York, and becoming a single mother to Norah in 1952. But as she grew older, Katherine slid back from screen to stage; she ended up performing Beckett’s Not I in “Yugoslavian and Mallorcan caves”. Later, after her career bottomed out, she went mad, shooting a producer in the foot and being sectioned.

In the decades since her mother’s death in 1986, Norah has busied herself with writing books, but she never tried “the one that was shouting out to be written, the