Inspiring Older Readers
The Green Road by Anne Enright
It always helps to have an author’s voice in my head when I am reading a novel. When we saw Anne Enright being interviewed at a recent literary event, she read a couple of passages from this one in her distinctive and expressive Irish accent, so I felt well equipped when I started reading.
Rosalie Madigan is the mother of four very different children: Hanna, Dan, Emmet and Constance who all spend their childhood in the family home in a small County Clare town. Life is very ordinary and often tedious but at the same time it is secure and predictable. Enright paints the picture of small town dramas with humour and affection, as she explained in her interview that even the rumour of someone having a new hot water bottle was cause for gossip.
The family saga begins in 1980 told from the youngest daughter Hanna’s perspective. She is an observant twelve year old girl who is trying to make sense of her mother’s reaction to the news that Dan wants to become a priest. Instead of being pleased, she has taken to her bed for two weeks leaving the rest of the family swirling around downstairs trying to manage. This is the first clue to the neediness of this woman who likes to think of herself as a matriarchal figure on whom everybody depends. It is a pivotal chapter that instead positions Rosalie as a very vulnerable and dependent woman. Enright read an extract from the moving scene that precedes her withdrawal to the bedroom where Dan makes his intentions crystal clear at a family meal. Her devastated reaction is described in such visceral detail that it is if one is sitting at the table:
‘Much crying, little eating. There was more work with the tissue, which was now in shreds. It was awful. The pain was awful. Her mother juddering and spluttering, with the carrots falling from her mouth in little lumps and piles’.
It turns out that Dan doesn’t become a priest after all as the next chapter takes us to New York in 1991 where he is living as a married man but dangerously flirting with gay sex amidst the destruction caused by Aids. At this stage we can only imagine Rosalie’s views on her son’s life because the focus is on the misery caused by the epidemic which is stripping away at Dan’s closest connections. Once again, Enright’s beautiful prose takes the reader right into the centre of this harrowing world, this time through the tender eyes of Billy, a man who fell deeply in love with Dan:
‘He dived under, with a curving bob and scissor kick of his long white shins, then surfaced on his back for a while. Each swell that lifted him set him down closer to shore until he turned to catch a breaking wave, scrabbling as he rode the surf, with his mouth pulled down’.
Next the author takes us to County Limerick in 1997 to see life through the eyes of the eldest sibling, thirty seven year old Constance. She is the one child who has stayed nearest to her now widowed mother and has three children of her own. She has a busy rather dull domestic life with memories of her adventures as a young woman living in Dublin, a place where she was determined to lose her virginity:
‘in those days, when the body was such a stupid place: when her skin was the most intelligent thing about her, for knowing how to blush, and she could not even name herself below the waist.’
Constance is not exactly happy, but she knows that she is married to a good man and adores the precious moments spent with her children. She loves the beautiful countryside and a possible cancer scare makes her determined to pay more attention to the details of life:
‘This year she would learn all the names. Sand pansies she knew and , further inland, the meadowsweet and woodbine, but there was a tiny yellow thing like broom that was also scented, and even the tough little succulent behind the marram called the bees through the salt air by their surprising, sweet perfume.’
Her only real cross to bear is Rosalie – but she tries her best to be the dutiful daughter and not to be jealous of the favourite child, Dan.
Emmett has grown up to have a very different life coloured by adventure and driven by the need to save lives in far off places beset with starvation, floods and famines. We have a glimpse of one of his jobs working in Mali in 2002 and learn about his difficulty in keeping a happy relationship with women. Remembering his experiences working in the Sudan, Enright describes a world that throbs with detail so that you can feel the unremitting heat and hear the murmuring of voices against the heavy silence of the streets:
‘starvation does not smell sweet, the way that death smells sweet. There’s a chemical edge to it, like walking past the hairdresser’s at home’.
The final part of the book brings the four children back to Ireland for a family Christmas with Rosalie in 2005. All does not go well. Each of the central characters evolves and changes through the years and are all very carefully observed from a range of angles although I have only described a few fragments of this wonderful novel. Enright is one of those rare authors who can transport the reader into extraordinary environments that are minutely described. Although she takes you travelling through time and to many different places, she never rushes but slowly unfolds the story and so allows you to stop and to enjoy each moment. I am delighted to know that she has already written several novels and hopefully many more for me to relish.
Karen Argent
April 2018