Obligations and escape
The matriarch at the heart of Anne Enright’s wise novel both attracts and repels her children, finds Allan Massie
When her elder son, Dan, a student in Galway, announces that he is going to become a priest, his mother, Rosaleen, takes to her bed in protest. Since this is Ireland in 1980 before the scandal of the abuse of children by priests and monks, her response may be surprising, for it was still then the wish of many Irish mothers that a son should enter the priesthood; but not Rosaleen. If Dan becomes a priest, he won’t be able to give her grandchildren; more significantly perhaps the Church will demand to be at the centre of his life – which is where Rosaleen wants to be. She is given to alternating between petting, even spoiling her children one moment, and ignoring or rebuking them the next. No one could call her ordinary or conventional. She dominates and infuriates them, and they can’t escape her, though all four – Constance, Dan, Emmet and Hanna – will seek different ways of trying to do so. Nevertheless all, at different times, are much concerned to please her; she has charm, intelligence and personality.
Dan is the first to get away, but not into the Church. The second, surprising section of the novel is set in New York in 1991, in the East Village, the heartland of the gay community, at the height, still, of the Aids epidemic. The shift in tone from County Clare and the stony little farm which Rosaleen’s husband had inherited, and where his mother still lives, peasant-style, is abrupt, unexpected and successful. There is a new narrative voice, though an unidentified one, that speaks from within the gay world, as “we”. Dan is to be found there, half-in and halfout. Commitment isn’t his thing. He has abandoned the priesthood, but not entirely his girlfriend from student days, even though he will soon be in bed with beautiful Billy. Refusal to commit is Dan’s way of escape, even rebellion.
His elder sister Constance takes the opposite course; escape into commitment to her husband and family, escape into ordinariness and practical cares. The third section sees her in 1997 in the outpatients’ department of Limerick Hospital; a lump has appeared on her breast. “She had three children and a husband to look after, not to mention her widowed mother. Constance did not have time for cancer.” Naturally she hasn’t told her mother about the mammogram, and she thinks her busy, rapidly-prospering builder husband, who is shy about such things, will have forgotten or chosen to forget her appointment. How splendidly true to life everything in this novel is.
Emmet’s escape is into aid work. 2002 finds him in Africa, with a girlfriend to who he can’t or won’t commit himself, and work in which he no longer fully believes. But it’s as far away from Rosaleen as he can get. As for the youngest, Hanna, a delightful child in 1980, she will become an actress, more often resting than working, and slipping into alcoholism. So they are all, one way or another, damaged people, even the sensible Constance whose husband prospers mightily as Ireland moves into the Celtic Tiger years when, at Christmas 2005, “a pub that, in their youth, smelt of wet wool and old men was now a gallery of scents, like walking through the perfume department in the Duty Free.”