taken from the TLS of May 11, 2007

Anne Enright
THE GATHERING
261pp. Cape. £12.99
978 0 224 07873 3.

Veronica Hegarty, the eighth of twelve children, now in her late thirties with the trappings of a successful life, returns to the family home to tell her mother about the death of Liam, the most wayward of the siblings and her favourite brother. In the ramshackle family home, a sprawling architectural nightmare of endless extensions -a symbol of the warped characters and relationships which developed there, but also of an Ireland unsure of both its roots and its future -she begins to imagine a series of scenes from her grandparents' youth in an attempt to identify the causes of Liam's suicide. If the question is not quite of original sin, then, at least, the sin lurking in the background is one of origins.

Anne Enright's fiction is preoccupied with bodies and the physical. In her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore (1995), family guilt is embodied in the wig that everyone sees but no one mentions. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) opens with a measured description of the sexual penetration of the body of that spectacular Irish Parisian courtesan, and follows Eliza's pragmatic use of it to become, for fifteen years, Paraguay's most powerful woman. What Are You Like? (2000), the story of twins separated at birth and attracted to one another across the Atlantic by a biological force, offers an oblique commentary on Irish separatism. Here, "history is only biological", as Veronica exclaims, recalling the decaying face of a man suffering from tertiary syphilis -his sexual history literally written on his body. The theme acquires a comic twist when one of the Hegarty sisters alters her distinctive family nose with cosmetic surgery.

Bodies, in the novel, are never so expressive as in death, and The Gathering is scattered with corpses: Liam's drowned in the sea, severed body parts carted back and forth between hospital wards, dead bodies in morgues or laid out for wakes, touched and observed, or pictured, as Liam's is, as "Mantegna's foreshortened Christ, in paisley pyjamas". It is the family's rare gathering around Liam's corpse that gives the novel its title. But for all its secular, even blasphemous, demonstrations, the novel is shot through with resounding religious metaphors.

Veronica's urge to reveal Liam's true history is the desire for her own vera icon, recalling the occasion when her namesake received the imprint of the face of Christ on a cloth on the way to Calvary: it is on her skin, in her bones, as "an expanding smell", that she remembers her brother. And the biological web which unites the family, the flesh and the blood, is framed in terms of the Eucharist.

Despite some thematic similarities with Edna O'Brien -both perceptive of peculiarly Irish families and sex -Enright is more interestingly placed among experimental, if otherwise diverse, Irish writers such as John Banville and Patrick McCabe, stretching the limits of a more conventional Irish realism engaged with social issues through self-conscious narrative techniques, intricate plotting and mystical overtones. The bodies and the sex here, often a question of holes and things to put in them, as well as many of the scenes Veronica imagines of Dublin in the 1920s, look back to James Joyce.

The precision of Enright's prose moves us smoothly between the present and Veronica's versions of the past, played out as a mute romantic drama between her grandmother Ada as a young woman, the frivolous husband-to-be Charlie, and Lambert Nugent, an alternative suitor and later the couple's landlord.

The transparency of Lambert's sinister intentions, turning up punctually to collect the weekly rent always with sweets for the children, contrasts with Ada's intriguing elusiveness: the sum of disjointed impressions from Veronica's childhood and retrospective bits of information. The same technique is attempted for Liam's character, but the suggestive details of his past -a girl crying, a brief visit to prison, a kitchen knife thrown at their mother, putting on a fluorescent jacket when drowning himself so as to be easily found -fail to invest his character with deeper significance, and offer little motivation for his suicide. The real mystery of the novel turns out to be the origins not of Liam's tragedy, but Veronica's, the tragedy of her rapidly disintegrating self.

Ultimately, it is Ireland itself that offers redemption in this admirable novel, receiving Veronica at the end of a symbolic journey of self-discovery -significantly a journey to England and back. Her own peculiar fall offers a different version of original sin.

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