Inherited trauma
Anne Enright’s new novel explores the fallout from the failings of an Irish poet on his daughter and granddaughter, writes Ellen Pierson-hagger
What do you do with a person, celebrated as a genius, who has done wrong? Worse still: what if that man is your father, or your grandfather? In The Wren, The Wren, the Irish author Anne Enright’s intricate eighth novel, that man is the poet Phil Mcdaragh. He abandoned the family’s Dublin home after his wife, Terry, became ill. He sent divorce proceedings from the United States, and remarried a woman hardly older than his first daughter. Over the following decades, his youngest daughter, Carmel, and then her daughter, Nell, live in his shadow.
The book in many ways feels common ground for Enright. A funeral is the titular event of her 2007 novel The Gathering, for which she won the Booker Prize, and a funeral proves crucial in this book too, when Carmel attends her father’s as a teenager. As the hearse drives from Dublin to Phil’s hometown of Tullamore, shopkeepers come out of their businesses, and pedestrians stop to pay their respects.
It’s then that Carmel begins to see the contradictions that filled her father’s life. The people who line the streets “in their anoraks and tweed caps” are people Phil “had scorned in verse”. After his mother died, he never returned to his hometown, embedding himself instead in an intellectual lifestyle in the city. Yet these people claim him as one of their own. Their affection, Carmel realises, is entirely one-sided.
Delivering Phil’s eulogy, another poet calls him “the finest love poet of his generation”. His works include verses about Carmel’s mother, and about the numerous other women with whom he was involved. Enright includes these poems – her creations, filled with natural imagery of the rural landscape in which he grew up – between the chapters of this book. He dedicated one of his best known works, “The Wren, The Wren”, to Carmel – but still she understands him as the destroyer of her family home.
Carmel raises Nell as a single mother. We meet Nell when she is in her twenties, living in a houseshare, picking up agency copywriting jobs. She is involved with an abusive man, Felim – note the aural similarity to her grandfather’s name – and there is a knotty darkness in the scenes detailing their coercive sex.
But there is a lightness here too, thanks to Nell’s wit and lively observations. Carmel, her daughter observes, “has a high-elbow style” when she eats with cutlery: “She wings those arms right out, cuts, folds, skewers, lifts, chews.” Elsewhere Enright’s rhythmic descriptions are reminiscent of the warm frivolity of Ali Smith: “He kissed me, and we were making out right there while the pedestrians gathered at the lights, and walked across, and gathered again. Red man. Green man. Red.”
Carmel and Nell’s relationship is volatile, but the absence of Phil Mcdaragh remains a constant.
Carmel’s boyfriend knows Phil’s poetry well enough to recite it, which makes Carmel question why she doesn’t.
Nell for a time finds a connection to her grandfather’s verse, even getting his famous wren tattooed on her finger, and one of his lines – “love is a tide” – below her collarbone. Her adoration does not last. Later, after reading more of her grandfather’s poems, she decides, “This guy is fully creepy”.
The Wren, The Wren is not a perfect novel. Some of its consecutive scenes are unsettlingly disparate. That there is just one, short chapter written from Phil’s perspective – while the rest of the book flits evenly between Carmel and Nell – feels odd.
Yet it is a rich and perceptive examination of uneven family relationships – and of what happens when, as Phil does in drawing inspiration from his own love affairs, we choose to make art from real life.