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.
