Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Books for October Meeting, 2007
The Gathering by Anne Enright
In a novel of exhilarating bleakness, The Gathering, Anne Enright conjures up the mother and father of all Irish families. Big families don't feature much in novels - I mean really big ones. It's hard to think of a larger fictional brood (Letters Editor, perhaps you'd better brace yourself) than HE Bates's seven Larkins. The Hegartys in Anne Enright's stunning new book The Gathering are 12 - Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica, Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and Jem. Enright's narrator is Veronica, seventh from the top, fifth from the bottom, 39 at the time of telling. Veronica dislikes her name, even after a nun explained to her that she was named for a saint who wiped the face of Christ on the road to Calvary and took the very first photograph. To Veronica, her name sounds either like the ointment or the disease.
A Larkin-sized family can seem to represent an abundance of vitality, but a Hegarty-sized one, which could empanel a jury without outside help, is almost the opposite of a family. Catholicism has something to do with large families and the Hegartys are nominally Catholic, but no more than that. Veronica has spent a lot of time over the years watching her father in church: 'I never heard him pray aloud, or saw him bend his head, or do anything that might be considered remarkable were he sitting on the top deck of a bus.' Which leads her to conclude that she was right all along in thinking that her parents' reproductive zeal was only a sort of incontinence - they 'were helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit'.
So large a family is more like a tribe, with its own rites of passage: 'We had a sister Ita who was, even then, the most disliked among us, as perhaps each of the girls were, at the moment their breasts began to grow.' There are compensations, but they seem modest: 'The thing is, there was great privacy in a big family. No one got into your stuff except to steal it or slag you off.' Punishment was delivered on a random or statistical basis. 'Although my father used to hit his children all the time, more or less, it was never personal. He might slap three at a time and let the fourth go or he might stomp among us with his hand raised as we ran, shrieking, around him.' Even good sibling relationships are similarly impersonal: 'Ernest was always nice to me, growing up. We were just the right distance apart.'
Veronica finds, when she communes with others similarly afflicted, that all big families are the same. 'There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister ...'
In fact, there's more than one drunk in the Hegarty family. They all drink, it's just that they don't drink together, and there is one official, certified excessive drinker, Liam, and that is mainly because 'a drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking'. It is Liam's suicide which sets the plot in motion. He has drowned himself in Brighton, considerately wearing a high-visibility jacket so that his body would be easy to find. He was only 11 months older than Veronica, which made him in her mind a sort of premature twin.
She registers her bereavement as a physical event: 'It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.' Veronica has a lot of grief work to do, while the body is bureaucratically delayed in England, and even after the wake and funeral. Enright's title obviously refers to these family get-togethers, but also perhaps to the process of Veronica's grieving, as she pulls strands from the past, trying to disentangle what is standard to 'the wound of family' and what is particular to the Hegarty history. Which are the first and which the final causes? Suspicions gather like the matter in an abscess.
She senses that the seeds of Liam's death were sown early, during a summer when their mother was giving birth or having a miscarriage (there's a whole Larkin family's worth of non-arrivers as well as the dozen delivered) and the children stayed in their grandmother Ada's house in Broadstone. Why is Germolene the smell of things going wrong?
Veronica tries to reconstruct Ada's life from the time she met her eventual husband, in 1925. These passages are almost too good - they're obviously the work of a professional imaginer, which Veronica, despite her background in journalism, can hardly be. Talent like Enright's can't easily be delegated to one of her creatures. There might have been a case for telling Ada's story impersonally, though the impossibility of Veronica's ever knowing what sort of relationship Ada had with her husband's friend Lambert Nugent, however vivid her guesses, is the whole point.
This is a story of family dysfunction, made distinctive by an exhilarating bleakness of tone. There is no sentimentality here, and no quirkiness. Enright may use local words like 'bocketty' and 'gobdaw', but her writing is guaranteed to be blarney-free. The humour in it is very close to pain. Veronica is clever, but she knows that cleverness isn't a solution to anything in itself. Aren't all the Hegartys clever? 'Clever, which is to say unredeemed; earning more or less money than the next person and liable to smart remarks.' Yet she's strangely good company even at her most negative.
Anne Enright has all she needs in terms of imagination and technique and she's a tremendous phrase-maker. All that I would timidly offer her is a bouquet of 'as ifs' with which to vary her 'likes'. The two constructions are usefully different. They point up different structures. In fact they're like the points on a railway line, sending the sense along one route or the other. When she writes that Veronica's husband is asleep with 'a straining smile at the edge of his eyes, like what he sees in the centre of his blind forehead is so convincing, and fleeting, and lovely ...', 'as if' instead of 'like' would announce in advance that the sentence won't end with 'forehead', which (grammatically) it might as things stand. But then I like to play Fantasy Creative Writing Class, in the way more red-blooded people play Fantasy Football. I'm always thinking of a class where all the students have genius and I get the credit.
guardian.co.uk, Adam-Mars Jones
It is a painful and truthful process, more like memoir than fiction, especially since meaning remains elusive, ends are not neatly tied. As Veronica says, ' We are human beings in the raw.'
Telegraph .co.uk, Harriet Patterson
"It is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction"
Guardian
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
An atmospheric, gritty, and compelling novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932, by the bestselling author of Riding Lessons. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, drifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her. Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.
From the Book Jacket
Despite her often cliche'd prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.
Publishers Weekly
The leisurely recreation of the circus's daily routine is lovely and mesmerizing, even if readers have visited this world already in fiction and film, but the plot gradually bogs down in melodrama.
Kirkus Reviews
Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and many unlikely literary figures have been drawn to their glitzy pageantry, soaring pretensions and metaphorical potential. Unsurprisingly, writers seem liberated by imagining a spectacle where no comparison ever seems inflated, no development impossible. For better and for worse, Gruen has fallen under the spell. With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale.
The New York Times - Elizabeth Judd
Some useful book club links (external links: opens new window):
Reader's Review site with active discussion board
Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities
October Selection