Anne Enright is one of our acutest chroniclers of relational complexity, whether she’s skewering filial pieties in The Wig My Father Wore (1995), staging a tragicomedy of intergenerational fallout in the Booker-winning The Gathering (2007), or unpicking the cliche of motherhood in her essay collection Making Babies (2004).
In her eighth novel, Enright again gives us a portrait of a uniquely unhappy family. Intimate and ambiguous, refusing to settle anywhere for long, The Wren, The Wren is told in three voices. There’s middle-aged Carmel, recalling her childhood on the outskirts of Dublin with her ailing mother, resentful older sister and womanising father. There’s Carmel’s free-spirited daughter Nell, who is trying to escape the intensity of their bond but only succeeds in swapping it for a far riskier one with an abusive lover; and finally, there is Carmel’s father himself, the poet Phil McDaragh, garrulous, seductive, pathologically self-regarding; the fount and origin of most of this dysfunction.
Phil is a ferocious sendup of the Famous Irish Poet. Tweed-clad, “full of fake modesty and feigned sorrow”, he’s “a big fan of the working man”, yet he leaves his wife and children to fend for themselves while he runs off to pursue a literary life in America. Decades later they are still getting over this betrayal. Examples of his verses – Heaneyesque lyrics about Irish fauna and flora – are scattered through the novel. These have all the sincerity of achieved art, but like Phil, their tenderness is an illusion.
The most tender of all is a poem called The Wren, The Wren. Dedicated to Carmel, the daughter Phil abandoned, it gestures at her birdlike vulnerability and his own “earthbound heart” – now “of her love’s weight / relieved”. On Carmel’s 16th birthday, philandering Phil sends her a letter urging her to turn her “infinite gaze to the masters of the Uffizi”. The consolations of art, indeed. Years later Carmel finds a video of an interview with the dodgy old aesthete and suddenly recognises his dangerous “doubleness”: “This is not just fake, I think. It’s an actual trap.”
But it’s Nell, Carmel’s daughter, who is truly, terrifyingly trapped by illusion. Of the three voices in The Wren, The Wren, hers is the least substantial and in many ways the most disturbing. In a bid to put some distance between herself and her mother’s possessiveness, Nell moves into a borrowed house on the other side of Dublin where she writes pieces for a travel website about places she has never visited and “poetry on pieces of paper, because I thought that using real paper meant they were real poems”. Soon she has fallen in love, or thinks she has, with another illusion: wholesome-looking Felim, a muscly country boy with a taste for sadistic sex.
After some choking and forced fellatio, Nell finds it “hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways”. If you believe in generational trauma, then the pattern here is clear. Though another of Phil’s poems, Inheritance, reflects cleverly on “The price of love lost / Or gained”, his real legacy to Nell is her openness to this “adventure in abjection”. This storyline appears to be building up to catastrophe, only to resolve itself, mercifully if a little bathetically, in a kooky travelogue. A real traveller in Italy at last, Nell treats us to generation Z’s thoughts on Renaissance painting: “Many of the hundreds of penises in the Uffizi are very small and also anatomically incorrect.” Take that, Phil and Felim.
Art as an illusion, love as a trap, the stranglehold of family ties: these are themes that Enright has already made her own. They are not just reprised here but honed to an essential honesty. Line for line, no one is more skilled than Enright at unfolding an unsettling scene. She is particularly good at depicting female rage. In a brutal passage, Carmel attacks Nell for having broken a kitchen light. Nell has done this deliberately, by throwing oranges at the bulb:
So Carmel reached into the bowl and threw one after another orange at Nell’s legs, and that seemed to work, after which they were gone and Carmel threw the empty bowl which bounced off Nell’s back and hit the floor, smashing there, so that Nell was stepping and dancing in the shards, which certainly did not bother her mother, who had been through a lot worse, a hell of a lot worse, than a stupid broken bowl.
“You think that’s bad?” she said. “You think that’s bad?”
In Enright’s novels violence is never heroic, though it’s often clarifying. Again and again, the real action is between women. As adults, Carmel and her sister Imelda act out the antagonism bred by years of fighting for their parents’ love by slamming each other around their childhood home: “A little hugff of air came out of Imelda as she hit the wall and Carmel shifted into a brighter place … It was as though her skull were filled with light.” The Wren, The Wren is ruthless, raw stuff, both less calculated and more illuminating than anything Phil McDaragh could have written.
• The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
