To read The Wren, The Wren is to enter a mercurial landscape. By turns bleak, stark, deeply disturbing, then uplifting, luminous, restorative. Her language punches holes in our consciousness. The ‘tiny little heart-break bird’, ‘the love the swoop and swoon the blood mashing in my ears’.
Narrated in three distinctive voices, the story follows Carmel, a middle-aged single mother trying to dodge the sharp edges of a fractured childhood; her Gen-Z, digitally assimilated daughter Nell, looking for answers to questions she can’t yet frame; Carmel’s father, Phil McDaragh, a poet of ‘some reputation’, is a womaniser, fraudulent friend of the working class, family deserter. Known by his daughters as ‘Daddo’, he’s the father who professes love but bequeaths affliction.
Tangled in the unfolding is a dark thread of cruelty. Enright never lets us forget that along with the higher impulses there co-exists in men a dark underbelly. The compulsion to desecrate, to bludgeon the weak, to power through. No coincidence then that the book’s title is inspired by a Celtic tradition known as ‘Hunt the Wren’. Celebrated annually on 26 December, during which a wren would be captured and paraded through towns and villages on top of a pole. Phil McDaragh, the fictional poet, takes the wren as a symbol for his dedicatory poem to his daughter, Carmel, in which lyricism becomes a surrogate for paternal love and an apology for broken promises. In tender prose he speaks of the bird, ‘so fierce and light’ that in ‘the push of her ascent away from me’ leaves his palm pin-pricked, and his earthbound heart heavy. Yet, years later, the daughter remembers only his self-importance, his ‘fake modesty’ and ‘feigned sorrow’.
Since her Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, Enright’s savage but acute observations of the relational complexities of families have become something of a trademark of her work. While they can be a bleak commentary on modern life, her brilliant skewering of its pretensions is also deftly comic.
Early in the book, Nell, Carmel’s daughter, thinks to herself, ‘Emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It’s just like melting.’ In this novel Enright’s world melts into ours with seamless brilliance.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. She studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.
She is a former RTE television producer. Her short stories have appeared in several magazines. She also won the 2004 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award for her short story, ‘Honey’. Her short story collection, The Portable Virgin was published in 1991, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two collections of stories, Taking Pictures and Yesterday’s Weather were published in 2008.
Her novels have been shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize. She has won the 2001 Encore Award and been shortlisted for the 2000 Whitbread Novel Award and the Man Booker Prize for Fictional well as the Irish Novel of the Year.
She lives in Ireland.
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