"The Wren, The Wren" by Anne Enright

The Shelbourne hotel Dublin is mentioned in the novel

 The story consists of periods, shuffled chronologically, in the lives of three members of an Irish family. Each has their chance to narrate. Phil, the grandfather was a poet; he remembers his boyhood in the country. Carmel, one of his daughters, ran, or perhaps runs, a language school and brought up her daughter, Nell, as a single parent. Nell is a freelance writer, working for influencers and producing work to market, for example, travel destinations. No-one seems to need to work very hard in order to earn a decent living and, in Nell's case, travel the world but we're not focusing on their economic activity. Rather, the book targets their sex lives.

Phil believes that all poetry is about unrequited love, and that all love is unrequited. He deserts his wife and daughters to travel and marry an American; he probably had multiple affairs as well. Carmel has divorced sex and relationships; the only real loves in her life are her Dadda and her daughter and she abandons a potential partner when it becomes clear that he might expect her to look after him. Nell is trapped in a physically abusive relationship with a man who is clearly seeing other women but whom she is in love with. 

Men certainly don't come out of this well. Most of them are portrayed as violent. The nice ones are needy but they all (except the gay one) expect to be looked after and serviced. And yet Phil the poet seems irresistible to women, Nell can't leave the man who hits her because she loves him. So why can't the women treat the men as potential sperm donors and live without them? Perhaps because, as Mal, the gay friend in Utrecht, tells Nell: "The thing women don't understand is that love and sex are opposite things ... Love requires ... two acts of submission, and sex ... really doesn't." (p 201)

But the joy in this book doesn't lie in its characters, strong though they are, nor in its fragmented and meandering plot, nor in its exploration of the issue of domestic violence, but in its words. The narratives are separated by Phil's poetry, and I don't really understand poetry, but scattered throughout are phrases and sentences of pure gold. Some are descriptive, some are nuggets of wisdom, 

Selected quotes: page references are from the 2023 Jonathan Cape hardback edition

Funny moments:

• "I was making my way out in the big bad world, and for some reason this involved a lot of staying in." (p 10)
• "The Hoover sat gathering its own dust at the top of the stairs." (p 60) 

Perfectly captured descriptions:

• "I stayed over, waking in the morning to the sight of him asleep, his lips easy and full, the air slipping into his body and slipping out again." (p 17)
• "I feel the room carve in two in front of my jostled eyes and space remake itself. That is what the gristle of his soul-splitting prick can do to me. And when he has pulled me apart, I remain whole." (p 53) Oh my goodness. Jostled eyes! Gristle!
• "It was starting to rain again, but there was a brightness in the air. The river ran full and fast, and all the colours were stronger for being wet." (p 157) Wow! So true. Colours are 'stronger' when they are wet.
• "I stared until the air in front of me became particulate." (p 181)  Yes! It is as if the world pixellating in front of your eyes.

Words of wisdom:

• "We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us." (p 4) Which is why we need novels.
• "I never tell my mother anything. I am not that stupid." (p 23)
• "Most of the time, I think, people aren't listening to each other, they are just waiting their turn to speak." (p 18)
• "Without beauty there can be no fear." (p 206)

More magical moments:

• "A year out of college, I was poking my snout and whiskers into the fresh adult air and I knew how to be ... My body was not on mute. I knew how to enjoy sex, eat, get drunk and recover, touch myself, touch someone else. I knew how to dance, get a little out of it and have big deep stupid discussions" (p 6) Even at my age, I can remember student days and weren't they just like this!
• "A nightjar, by the way, can ventriloquise. Its song sounds as though it is coming from the other tree. This must be confusing when mating with a nightjar - you'd have to land on a lot of other trees first." (p 9) An original way of saying that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, so relevant to Nell in this part of her life.
• "My mother is strongly of the opinion that, if you don't think about yourself then you won't have any problems. For Carmel, having a pain means you are self-obsessed." (p 11)
• "In those days, men were not expected to be around: the difference between married and deserted could be the seven hours your husband spent asleep in bed." (p 68)
• "The same mixture of cooing and shrieking around the cot that happened around the wedding ... It was the sound women make, she thought, when they are offering their lives up for slow destruction." (p 102)
• "Birth was not the end of pregnancy, she thought, it was just pregnancy externalised." (p 110)
• "There were scones on the bottom tier, tiny sandwiches in the middle, fancy pastries at the top - all of which remained untouched. It was a little competition. A cake off." (p 160)
• "I can't stop the giggles. They well up, burst out of my face in a slow-motion, peristaltic wave. I am a broken-hearted woman, trapped in a body that finds everything hilarious. It feels a bit like vomiting." (p 201)
• "The fear I have is the fear of angels. It is not terror, but awe." (p 206)
• "The first words out of every angels mouth are, Do not be afraid." (p 207)
• "Nell's thumbs flying on her screen - as though late capitalism ... could be defeated by hashtags and eating kimchi." (p 216)
• "For Imelda, information was like money. She didn't want you to have it, in case you spent it in the wrong shop." (p 227)
• "This guy's sense of humour is so bone dry, his jokes are identical to not funny at all." (p 246)

It's not so much a novel as a beautiful piece of jewellery, its scintillations catching your eye as you look at if under different slants of light.

February 2024; 273 pages

The author won the Booker Prize in 2007. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God