Anne Enright's Blog, page 5

A grandfather with a rifle under the floorboards, a granny whose hero was Patrick Pearce and playing ‘Insurrection’ in the playground – Irish writers reflect on what the 1916 rebellion has meant for them and their country

In the early hours of the Thursday of Easter week 1916 my grandfather came into the front bedroom of the small house in Enniscorthy. His sons woke and watched as he lifted some of the floorboards and removed a rifle. The Rising in Dublin had begun on Monday, but outside Dublin there was confusion. To get a clear idea of what was happening, a man called Paul Galligan had gone by bicycle the 75 miles from Enniscorthy to Dublin, arriving on Easter Sunday. The following day he met with three of the leaders of the Dublin Rebellion in the General Post Office. He was told to go back home to Enniscorthy and instruct the other members of the movement to take the town and hold the railway line, thus stopping British forces from getting from Rosslare to Dublin. He rode back to Enniscorthy by a circuitous route so he would not be detained, arriving on the Wednesday. The Rising in Enniscorthy began the following morning. Between 100 and 200 took part at the beginning, although more joined later. Compared to Dublin, the Enniscorthy Rising was small. No one was killed; two or three were wounded; no buildings were destroyed. “We had one day of blissful freedom,” one of the Enniscorthy leaders said. (The Rising lasted just a few days.) But perhaps its real importance came when the Rebellion ended. The British arrested almost 300 people in Enniscorthy and its environs. One of these – Séamus Doyle – was even sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted. In later years, he lived in a house close to ours and devoted himself to the growing of roses and grumbling about boys who kicked their football into his garden.

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Suffering a touch of midlife madness, the author found herself drawn to the dramatic west coast of Ireland and a way of writing she had always resisted – one with a strong connection to her past

In the spring of 2012 we took a long rent on a little house in the Burren, on the west coast of Ireland, with a view down to the limestone flats of the Flaggy Shore and across to the Aran Islands. This is a wild and beautiful part of the world. Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory all wrote about the islands; Heaney and, especially, Michael Longley also about the Flaggy Shore. It is an iconic landscape of the Irish national revival.

Perhaps it was the change of location, but it was one of those times in my life when I wasn’t entirely sure who I was any more. Every day I would walk out and let the wind blow these questions out of my mind, and also take in the wildness of the place. The green road is just that: a boreen, an unpaved track that crosses the uplands of the Burren from Ballynahown to the Caher Valley, with a changing view from the Cliffs of Moher in the south to the Twelve Bens and Maumturk mountains in the far north, across Galway Bay.

Related: Anne Enright announced as Ireland’s first fiction laureate

Related: Beyond the blarney: the best hidden gems in Ireland

Related: The Green Road by Anne Enright review – an exquisite collage of Irish lives

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Suffering a touch of midlife madness, the author found herself drawn to the dramatic west coast of Ireland and a way of writing she had always resisted – one with a strong connection to her past

In the spring of 2012 we took a long rent on a little house in the Burren, on the west coast of Ireland, with a view down to the limestone flats of the Flaggy Shore and across to the Aran Islands. This is a wild and beautiful part of the world. Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory all wrote about the islands; Heaney and, especially, Michael Longley also about the Flaggy Shore. It is an iconic landscape of the Irish national revival.

Perhaps it was the change of location, but it was one of those times in my life when I wasn’t entirely sure who I was any more. Every day I would walk out and let the wind blow these questions out of my mind, and also take in the wildness of the place. The green road is just that: a boreen, an unpaved track that crosses the uplands of the Burren from Ballynahown to the Caher Valley, with a changing view from the Cliffs of Moher in the south to the Twelve Bens and Maumturk mountains in the far north, across Galway Bay.

Related: Anne Enright announced as Ireland’s first fiction laureate

Related: Beyond the blarney: the best hidden gems in Ireland

Related: The Green Road by Anne Enright review – an exquisite collage of Irish lives

Continue reading...

Anne Enright marvels at Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s intense memoir of growing up in Rhodesia

What happens when it’s all your fault, and not your fault at all? At the centre of Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible. Nothing about it makes sense, except in a magical way, and her eyes are opened by that incomprehension to see the world with the stalled, wise gaze of an eight-year-old girl.

It is not a troubled gaze, though she lives through troubled times; it is just endlessly accurate. Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame. She grows up during the bush war that helped turn Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, and she survives that too, in the gung-ho colonial style. Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight (2002) is full of the sheer bloody enjoyment of being alive. It is also a triumph of proper judgment, a political comedy, an act of clarity.

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Anne Enright marvels at Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s intense memoir of growing up in Rhodesia

What happens when it’s all your fault, and not your fault at all? At the centre of Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible. Nothing about it makes sense, except in a magical way, and her eyes are opened by that incomprehension to see the world with the stalled, wise gaze of an eight-year-old girl.

It is not a troubled gaze, though she lives through troubled times; it is just endlessly accurate. Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame. She grows up during the bush war that helped turn Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, and she survives that too, in the gung-ho colonial style. Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight (2002) is full of the sheer bloody enjoyment of being alive. It is also a triumph of proper judgment, a political comedy, an act of clarity.

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Kushner's first novel is an epic and enjoyable look at wealth tainted by loss in expatriate Cuba

In Rachel Kushner's second novel The Flamethrowers, a woman comes off a motorbike at 140mph and is not killed. She does not break a single bone. She has also – as though by accident – set the record for the fastest woman on the planet. Reno is the opposite of a tragic heroine; undamaged, not just by machinery, but by the machinery of fate. She is unburdened by the smallness of her life or the difficulties of her own psychology. Sex is not a problem, shame is an irrelevance. This last is in part due to her willingness to become the girl in the picture, to be relaxed in the face of her own fetishisation. Reno sees no limitations, she is uninterested in her own pain and hugely, endlessly, interested in everything else.

To be a reader at the centre of this interest is to feel more alive with every sentence. Kushner's prose in The Flamethrowers is all speed, energy and verve – you begin, almost, to want a little dullness. But there is no doubting that Kushner knows what she is doing with the slightly empty characterisation of Reno – a writer this brilliant and this self-aware does not leave an accidental blank.

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Kushner's first novel is an epic and enjoyable look at wealth tainted by loss in expatriate Cuba

In Rachel Kushner's second novel The Flamethrowers, a woman comes off a motorbike at 140mph and is not killed. She does not break a single bone. She has also as though by accident set the record for the fastest woman on the planet. Reno is the opposite of a tragic heroine; undamaged, not just by machinery, but by the machinery of fate. She is unburdened by the smallness of her life or the difficulties of her own psychology. Sex is not a problem, shame is an irrelevance. This last is in part due to her willingness to become the girl in the picture, to be relaxed in the face of her own fetishisation. Reno sees no limitations, she is uninterested in her own pain and hugely, endlessly, interested in everything else.

To be a reader at the centre of this interest is to feel more alive with every sentence. Kushner's prose in The Flamethrowers is all speed, energy and verve you begin, almost, to want a little dullness. But there is no doubting that Kushner knows what she is doing with the slightly empty characterisation of Reno a writer this brilliant and this self-aware does not leave an accidental blank.

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Irish author and Booker prize winner Anne Enright talks to John Mullan at the Guardian Review book club about her tale of adultery in the time of boom and crash, The Forgotten Waltz

A narrator who walks the high wire of the reader's sympathy

Aislinn Kelly should be really annoying, but isn't; and this is such a great trick, it makes you wonder how she walks the high wire of our sympathy. She is the narrator of the latest book by Gwendoline Riley, a writer who likes to keep things close. Riley gives us first-person narratives from people who are a lot like her, being writers and drifters; young women who don't quite know what is wrong with them, or whether they want to put it right. Nonchalance and authenticity are almost the same thing here, though both words are a little strong, in the circumstances. Riley keeps her sentences smart, affectless and most wonderfully flat.

Nothing much happens to Aislinn over the course of this novel. She talks about her stupid, creepy father, fights with her American boyfriend, has conversations with friends, and goes to her mother's retirement party. She also spends some time in Indianapolis, writing. The dialogue is the opposite of sparkling. Aislinn's father uses "er" as a weapon and the off-the-beat use of italics reads like a threat. He sends a series of unanswerable emails to Aislinn when she is at college, one in response to her first book: "Oh dear! Oof! Posing! Er, what?"

A highly accomplished debut story collection is full of tiny pleasures

Mary Costello has written for many years with an occasional story published, but no great encouragement to keep her at her desk. If she is an emerging writer, then she has emerged with great slowness and care. This first collection has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right. A few, perhaps the earliest, have an old-fashioned, derivative air, but when she breaks into the world of contemporary Ireland, Costello's work is true, her problems distinctive and the voice all her own.

This is a writer unafraid of the graveside, or the bedside, of filling the space of the story to the brim. Large events happen in small lives people die, for a start, they fall in and out of love, they have children and affairs. The slow leaking of love out of a relationship is described in particular and terrible banality, as Costello's characters move about their ordinary rooms. There is a kind of immaculate suburban sadness in many of these tales.