The Gathering
by Anne Enright
Summary
Liam Hegarty has walked into the sea at Brighton with stones in his pockets. His sister Veronica goes to England to collect the body, and the novel is what happens in her head between the identification and the funeral in Dublin, where the nine surviving Hegarty children will gather.
Veronica is trying to write something down. She believes she knows what happened to Liam in their grandmother Ada's house in the winter of 1968, when they were small and staying there, and she keeps circling it and reconstructing the generation before, inventing her grandmother's courtship because she has no way of knowing it. She admits, repeatedly, that she may be making some of this up.
Enright writes grief as insomnia and rage rather than as sorrow. Veronica drives around Dublin at four in the morning, is unkind to her husband, cannot bear her own comfortable life, and is very funny throughout in a way that keeps ambushing you.
It is short and it is not an easy read, less because of the subject than because Veronica is difficult company on purpose. Readers who want a family saga will not get one. What you get is the truest account of the first month of a bereavement in modern Irish fiction.
Read it if you admired Anne Enright's later novels and want the one that made her name, or if you have recently lost someone and want a book that does not tidy it up. Avoid it if you are looking for consolation, because there is none on offer here.
Historical Context & Significance
The Gathering won the Booker Prize in 2007, and Anne Enright was the first Irish woman to take it.
It was widely reported as a surprise. The shortlist included Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, both far better known, alongside Lloyd Jones, Nicola Barker and Indra Sinha, and the bookmakers had Enright well down the field. Reviewers described the novel as bleak with the same regularity that they described it as brilliant, and Enright herself called the book "the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie".
The win consolidated a run of Irish success at the prize and preceded a broader international turn toward Irish fiction. Enright was later appointed the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction, a post created to recognise exactly the kind of standing the Booker had given her.