The savagely funny and ruthlessly observational Irish writer Anne Enright does a fine line in scrutinising and dismantling the wonky mechanics of malfunctioning families. Specifically, Irish families. The Gathering and The Green Road captured the chaotic din of large mobs, and her most recent novel, Actress, zoomed in on and dissected the complex dynamics of a troubled mother-daughter relationship.
With The Wren, The Wren, her eighth novel, she turns her sharp gaze again to families and relationships: parents and children, grandfather and granddaughter, sisters, and murky, unromantic (and sometimes noxious and abusive) trysts. In true Enright tradition, there is an Irish funeral. The fond and sometimes generationally distant dynamics between mother Carmel and her daughter Nell come into play, as does the melancholy legacy of Carmel’s father, Phil McDaragh from Tullamore, who instead of becoming a priest became an infamous Irish poet, “the finest poet of his generation”, as declared at his funeral. While he may be a celebrated writer, he walked out on his family in the 1970s when his wife Terry, Carmel’s mother, was ill with cancer, taking a hefty chunk of her money and leaving her with two young daughters while he wandered off in search of a younger muse in the US.
Told from multiple perspectives in a slightly more experimental, fragmented way than usual, the novel begins and ends with Nell, a 27-year-old who writes scraggy-drunk poetry “that ends with the pen going through the page”, when she isn’t churning out inane travel copy as a freelancer in her cold Dublin flat. We flash back to Carmel as a girl, suffering the fallout of her father’s walkout, and forward to her life as a solo mother. And we gain flashes of insight from Phil the poet, with his drinker’s stomach and smoker’s cough. All of this is intercut with his pastoral poems, significantly a poem sharing the novel’s title, dedicated to Carmel, his favourite daughter, and written after he has left the family home: “And, oh, my life, my daughter, the far away sky is cold and very blue.”
The wren is a harbinger of spring and rebirth, and is central to Irish tradition on St Stephen’s Day. Carmel is herself wren-like, small but resilient. Other birds feature through the novel: the nightjar, the cuckoo, the bullfinch, the yellow bittern. At one point Nell muses, “from where I am sitting, the past is a lonely place”. The precise location where she is sitting is, in fact, New Zealand, where she briefly goes on holiday, gazing out at Rangitoto – a “shallow nipple of a mountain” – and observing the bellbird “that bongs and beeps like the bridge on Star Trek, and the little fantail which really does Fan that Tail”. Nell is worried about climate change and its effects on wildlife.
Enright’s wicked turns of phrase and withering put-downs are ever-present. Nell observes that “Irish people all talk like old women, even the men”. And after a one-night stand, she describes the man: “He works in tech, so he is white as a maggot.” The walls of her mother’s house are described as being painted “different shades of gunk: ointment-pink, putty, marsh”.
This is a novel to savour, as it unfolds slowly, charting family histories, myth-making and legend. Each voice is distinct: Nell is twitchy, spiky and usually in first person, Carmel is deliberate and detached in third person, while Phil narrates in poetic flourishes “as he mocks the world with his fake sorrow”. The Wren, The Wren is sometimes frosty, often sharply hilarious and always crisply observed.
