Commuting back and forth to Center City Philadelphia by train, I notice many people absorbed in reading. Beyond the daily newspaper consumers, there are a host of book readers. Unfortunately, judging by the book jackets, too many are indulging in bodice-ripping romances or the “Find Mr. Right and Never Have to Work Again” (or commute by train) variety. And then there’s a slim group of serious fiction readers. The man to my right, as I scribble notes, is in the latter category. He is finishing A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy.
Why do we read fiction? Many would say to explore a world different from our own. Others long to meet richly drawn characters with whom they can identify. Still others seek to be reminded of old truths expressed in fresh ways.
Anne Enright’s 2007 Man Booker Prize-winning novel and Amazon Books best-seller, The Gathering, succeeds in all of these ways. Yet the most memorable feature of this book may well be the beautiful writing-sentence after sentence. As a writer, Enright delights and excels at her craft.
Don’t expect The Gathering, however, to delight in content. For starters, the book’s title refers to the assembling of adult siblings from a large Irish family, back to their childhood homestead in Dublin for their brother’s wake. Bleaker yet, Brother Liam was an alcoholic who took his life by putting rocks in his pockets and walking out to sea.
The story is told by Veronica Hegarty, a 39-year-old former journalist married to a financier, who informs us that she had the closest relationship in the family to Liam. Hers is a distinctive and memorable voice. This first person point of view provides a deeply textured interiority and intimacy on every page.
After being the first in the family to hear of Liam’s suicide, Veronica travels to identify her brother’s body. “Here I am on the Brighton Hues, on my way to collect my brother’s body, or view it, or say hello to it, or goodbye, or whatever you do to a body you once loved.”
Veronica reminisces at length about her relationship with her brother. She also reflects on the various roles that give her life meaning: daughter, sister, wife, and mother. At different times throughout the novel she has a love/hate relationship with each of these roles. Clearly, Veronica is not the easiest person to like. She’s coarse, impatient, and embittered. She’s unhappy with her husband, estranged from various family members, and often indifferent to her two young daughters. Yet we are drawn in to her, her world, and her insights on many issues.
A. L. Kennedy writing about this book in The Guardian said Enright makes “a genuine attempt to stare down both love and death, to anatomise their pains and fears and peculiar pleasures.”
Such a grand ambition attempted by a less gifted author would undoubtedly fail. Yet Enright succeeds through her protagonist Veronica in looking long and hard at love and death, as well as a long-abandoned childhood Catholic faith that provides no comfort.
The grieving sister’s relationship with her now deceased brother drives the plot. Veronica’s mind moves fluidly from the grim realities of the present to the lighter memories of times she and Liam shared as children and the special bond they formed.
Yet there is a great childhood wound that Liam experienced and Veronica tries to come to terms with as an adult. It is central to the story. In a heartbreaking disclosure, Veronica says: “If I believed in such a thing as confession I would go there and say that, not only did I laugh at my brother, but I let my brother laugh at himself all his life.” She muses, “Usually, people’s brothers become less important, over time. Liam decided not to do this. He decided to stay important, to the end.”
And in the midst of this dark tragedy, Veronica finds her few comforts in a journey of memory rather than a journey of faith. In fact, in attempting to bury her childhood religion she becomes more haunted by it. Instead of putting that formal religion to rest, she rants against it at many points.
“I don’t go to Mass now, and have passed little of it on to my children, though Rebecca, eight, is going through a pious phase, probably to thwart me…my eight year old has turned her new, fully human face to God,” she says.
Describing her husband, Veronica says, “Tom was taught by the Jesuits….He is completely selfish…but in the poshest possible way.” And commenting on Dublin’s townspeople at Lent, she observes: “They have suffered the ashes and kissed the rood and felt truly, deeply, spiritually, cleaned out.”
Dublin, its people, its language, and landscape are all almost characters in the book. Enright weaves in many Irish expressions that must be read a second time in context to have a clue of what she means. But it’s all part of being drawn in to this unique world.
Gathering, finally, with her family for her brother’s wake, Veronica notes, “We do not always like the people we love-we do not always have that choice.” One might wonder at this point if there is some redemption in the end to make reading this dark book worthwhile. You must read it to find out.
I will say, however, that while reading The Gathering, Veronica was often on my mind. I recalled her wit, intelligence, and totally secular viewpoint about life, death, and family. She came to mind while I was reading a Christmas letter from a Wheaton literature professor. Like Veronica, this professor had lost a brother he loved; and at the time he wondered, “What kind of God rules a world where suffering and death can strike so suddenly, and devastatingly?”
This professor found comfort in stories like Abraham’s relationship with his son Isaac, which foreshadows the gospel story. Abraham took this ram and offered it as a sacrifice “instead of his son.” That the God of Abraham once became a child seems almost beyond imagining; but so it was, for the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us.
No doubt, the many Veronica Hegartys with whom we come in contact would find these sentiments naïve-or worse. They question God’s existence, and if he does exist, what could we possibly have done to need the sacrifice of his son for our salvation? Yet even Veronica states a profound truth when facing her brother’s wake: “There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important.” She sees the fleeting quality of life and how humbled we are in the face of death.
We need to feel the pain of the Veronicas of this world who have no comfort in life or in death that they would come to know the God of all comfort.
