Dublin housewife Veronica reflects on her dear drunk brother Liam, who has just drowned himself in the sea at Brighton, for reasons she alone guesses. “I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen.” Despite the pretentious memory-as-illusion approach, it seems Veronica did once see something nasty in the woodshed, or the front room, or the garage (if she could only make up her mind).

Freud talked about our fixation with “the dirty-handkerchief side of life”, a hangover from the child’s fascinated disgust at sexuality, physicality and decay. Being to do with taboo, it is strongest in the highly repressed, and Veronica has it in spades. She indulges in a fantasy about the time her grandmother, Ada, met the man she married, Charlie, and the man she did not marry, Nugent, who became the couple’s interfering landlord (“Nugent feels it stir in the deep root of his penis; the future...”). She recalls when “a man followed me through the back streets of Venice, many years later, with his erection in his hand... I would die, my face jammed in filthy gabardine”. She didn’t die, of course: he went away. Note that the coat has to be “filthy”. Veronica can’t just carry a suitcase, it has to be a suitcase of “dirty clothes and squeezed-out tubes of spermicidal jelly”.

On the train to Brighton, the man next to her falls asleep and she imagines “the thick oblong of his penis moving down the leg of his suit. Here comes another one.” The horror. She fantasises about her grandparents in bed, in squelchy medical detail, then a middle-aged fling between Ada and Nugent, his mouth on “Ada’s little pouch of a breast with its hard, upturned nipple”. She can’t think of Ada working the mangle on washday without seeing a dress “drop into the bucket like a Crimplene turd”, leading to a disquisition on dirty nappies. She opens a chapter, “I saw a man with tertiary syphilis at Mass, once.” She sees the people on Brighton seafront as a mere “parade of lax flies and stained trousers. . . The living, with their smells and holes”. Back home in bed with her husband, “I wake to a livid tumescence on his prone body,” (she means supine) “a purple thing on the verge of decay.” It starts to drive you mad after a while. I don’t know if that’s coming across at all?

Anne Enright does not seem fully aware of it, just as she seems unaware that a first-person narrator cannot convincingly relate those omniscient third-person flash-backs, or that the story line depends on the rickety device of making Veronica withhold for purely structural reasons a secret she knows all along. There are some quite good set-piece scenes, and a valid attempt to show “a family – a whole f***ing country – drowning in shame”, but, God, it’s wearing. As for the would-be perceptive description of a wedding, “an honest man, a lovely girl, f***ing, in the nicest possible way, to cheers and the clink of glasses”, I know Ireland has changed its uptight ways lately, but not that much.

THE GATHERING by Anne Enright

Cape £12.99 pp261

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