Early on in Anne Enright’s spellbinding new novel, Nell, a young woman in Dublin, is thinking about the mystery of human separateness. She calls it “the empty air which exists between people” and concludes that “it might be crossed by emotion, but it might not.” This could also be a summary of the problem of writing itself: it may or may not transport itself across the empty space between author and reader.
The Wren, the Wren is, like so much of Enright’s work, a supple scrutiny of familial relationships – in this case the fraught love between Nell and her mother, Carmel. But it is also a meditation on this other way of connecting – or failing to connect – through language.
