Book review

Actress lacks perspective

Actress by Anne Enright Jonathan Cape ($35) Reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

Fact and fiction aren’t separate realms. Be it reality or literature, the everyday or the theatrical, the story of a life and the lived experience are subject to invention, artifice and one-sided perception.

Here is the thematic territory for Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright’s latest offering, Actress, a cleverly-layered but ultimately frustrating tale about the career and personal existence of Irish stage-star Katherine O’Dell, told from the perspective of her protective but conflicted daughter, Norah.

For movie buffs like me, the image on the book’s cover tells us everything about its immersion into the hinterland between verity and creativity.

For it’s a famed photograph capturing Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher as a child, waiting in the wings as her mother, Debbie Reynolds, performs on stage. Rather, the credit refers only to it belonging to a wellknown visual media company.

It’s certainty withheld, the photograph becomes a visual symbol for the contents inside the cover, something reinforced when Norah reminisces about a famous photograph taken of her sitting off-stage looking on as her mother acted.

Actress, then, isn’t the fictional portrayal of the fraught Reynolds-Fisher relationship, it’s something else.

Something, it turns out, quite like that renowned dysfunctional celebrity motherdaughter connection, just transposed one-sidedly by Enright’s novelistic talent to another country and acting profession.

Through Norah’s narration, Enright crafts O’Dell, like all stars, as a composite: persona; portrait; performer; person; known and unknown; mother and solitary; sex object and celibate.

Even her surname is a mistake, an error. It’s left to Norah to offer her mother’s parentage, childhood, the accident of her stardom, successes, mistakes, passions and broken hearts. Through the daughter’s eyes, readers also perceive Katherine’s immersion in the political figures and radical actions of the IRA.

This is all beautifully plotted, richly evoked stuff. The complexities of stardom, the theatrical world, the volatility of Dublin in the 1970s: all come to life.

Enright’s skills in language and detail play with the notion of the theatrical aspects of Katherine and Norah’s existences, astutely constructing the notion of a double-drama – the staged life of the actress and her offspring – playing out across the pages.

Not only do we question the reality of this double act’s day-to-day life, but other uncertainties arise, such as the lengths to which Norah, in telling us of her mother’s existence, is systematically in denial about it.

Equally though, there’s something here that increasingly dawns on the reader as a deficiency. For Actress is a novel about someone who never reveals anything about herself. The novel reinforces the importance of Katherine to Norah, and vice-versa; yet, to its detriment, only permits one voice into a tale that is promulgated upon the verity that there is no singular truth, no singular story.

Ultimately, as when reading Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge, which marginalises and silences Debbie’s perspective, it’s Norah’s exclusive creation of Katherine’s character that leaves readers of Enright’s new novel feeling let down.