By Anne Enright
Three generations of Irish women
Subject
Themes
Three generations of Irish women live in and out of the shadow of a charming, destructive, gifted man. Phil McDaragh grew up in rural County Offaly, read himself out of poverty through a parish priest's library, and told the priest at twelve that he had been made not a priest but a poet. He was right. His poems are real: beautiful translations from the medieval Irish, nature lyrics that people love, a voice that makes whole rooms lean forward. He also left his wife when she was sick, had serial affairs, photographed women as raw material for verse, and treated the Greek poet Selma Karras, by Selma Karras's own account, very poorly. These facts and the gift are not separable. They arrive in the same blood.
Three generations of Irish women live in and out of the shadow of a charming, destructive, gifted man. Phil McDaragh grew up in rural County Offaly, read himself out of poverty through a parish priest's library, and told the priest at twelve that he had been made not a priest but a poet. He was…
Anne Enright is one of Ireland's most significant literary voices, and her 2007 novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize. The Wren, the Wren (2023) arrived to widespread critical acclaim and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction. It was widely received as one of…
The structure of the novel is built on the premise that inheritance is not chosen. What passes from one generation to the next is not distributed according to fairness or intention: the damage and the gift arrive together, in the same blood, in the same gestures, in the same quick smirk at the end…
One of the novel's central preoccupations is what the body holds that language cannot fully carry: sensation, memory, recognition, damage. Each of the three narrators uses the body differently as a site of meaning, and the body's evidence is often more reliable than what any of them can say…
A central tension in the novel runs between two ways of making images: poems and photographs. Phil makes poems from women. Felim takes photographs of them. The novel does not treat these as entirely different acts; in important ways it suggests they belong to the same continuum. Phil's poems for…
The central domestic relationship in the novel is between Carmel and Nell, and it is shaped by the particular kind of love that cannot deliver what the beloved most needs. Carmel loves Nell absolutely. The love is not in question. What is in question is what form it can take, and whether that form…
Birds appear on almost every page of the novel. Phil translates medieval Irish poems about the wren and the yellow bittern. Nell tracks birds across four continents as a form of attention practice. Carmel photographs the courgette flowers in her garden the way she might photograph a rare sighting.…
Nell is twenty-three when the story begins, a freelance social media writer living in a rented Dublin houseshare and tracking her menstrual cycle through an app. She is the granddaughter of the poet Phil McDaragh and the daughter of Carmel, and the novel's most expansive and kinetic voice. She…
Carmel is Phil's middle daughter and Nell's mother. She is a GP, a single parent, a meticulous cleaner of fridges, a maker of very good spaghetti, and a woman who has organised her entire life around the proposition that the bad thing will happen and what you do then is what matters. She is in her…
Phil McDaragh narrates his own chapter from the distant past, a first-person account of growing up in rural County Offaly in the early twentieth century. He is dead by the time the novel's present tense begins, killed by an early and catastrophic bleed to the lung that the autopsy would attribute to…
Felim is in his thirties, from a farming family in County Louth, and Nell's account of him is the novel's most sustained engagement with the specific mechanics of coercive behaviour. He appears at her door every few weeks from work, has a few drinks but not too many, stays for sex, and departs. He…
David Brocklehurst is English, in his late twenties or early thirties, privately educated at Durham School, and a teacher of the children of the international super-rich. He came up through the class system far enough to know what it was, and not far enough to belong anywhere he went. He lives in…
A researcher in Nevada fits a young woman named Melanie with a beeper that goes off randomly throughout the day, and each time it sounds she must record exactly what is in her mind. Some people, the researcher discovers, think in vivid Technicolor images; others think in body sensations or fragments…
Carmel McDaragh is Phil's middle daughter and Nell's mother. She narrates her own story in the same clear, unsentimental voice she uses for her medical practice: this is what happened, here is what it cost, here is what I built from the wreckage. The chapter opens with a childhood memory that…
Nell is obsessed by light. It is hard to turn this into cash. She tracks her menstrual cycle through an app that asks whether she is 'happy, frisky' and deploys little heart icons for sex, which she mostly ignores. She has a ghost period: the date shows grey on the calendar, the blood refuses to…
When Nell is nine, Carmel goes to the Abbey Theatre on her own. In the queue for tickets, a man touches her elbow and says, sorry, he thought she was someone else. Then: you are Phil McDaragh's daughter. Carmel suppresses the familiar irritation. This is how she is identified in the world, as Phil's…
Phil McDaragh grows up in a stone cabin a few miles outside Tullamore, the middle child of seven. The near field belongs to the cows and the far meadow to the hay and drowsy bees. Between them is a disused quarry that Phil thinks of as a fairy place; he leaves saucers of milk there in the evenings…
Nell leaves Dublin and goes to Lily in London, who has a room in King's Cross that is exactly fifteen feet square. They were not students anymore, Lily says; the sink was not a self-cleaning mechanism. What Nell wants more than anything is uninterrupted crying time. She tells Lily she needs to write…
On a Friday night Carmel stumbles across a television interview of Phil on YouTube. She closes the laptop, takes wine from the fridge, turns on the television for the first time in months, and wakes up on the sofa having dreamt that a door in her house opened onto a room full of clay. In the morning…
Nell remembers a gathering, when she was eight or nine, at which her aunt Imelda read aloud a letter from a poet called Harvey. The letter described Phil and Terry's love as 'darkly ecstatic' and declared that this knowledge, of having been loved like that, would sustain Nell's grandmother in her…
Carmel surveys David Brocklehurst across the kitchen table. Thinning blond hair swept to one side. Fragile skin with an undertone of jet-lag grey. Not much by way of a mouth. He is called Brocklehurst, which is not Scottish but Saxon apparently. He went to Durham School, he says, not to the…
Something shifts for Nell in her mother's back garden on a Sunday morning, while David and Carmel orbit each other inside over ravioli and conversation. A bullfinch lands on the head of the stone dryad, the large garden sculpture Carmel had dragged through the ground floor on a grocer's trolley and…
Nell is twenty-three when the story begins, a freelance social media writer living in a rented Dublin houseshare and tracking her menstrual cycle through an app. She is the granddaughter of the poet Phil McDaragh and the daughter of Carmel, and the novel's most expansive and kinetic voice. She…
Carmel is Phil's middle daughter and Nell's mother. She is a GP, a single parent, a meticulous cleaner of fridges, a maker of very good spaghetti, and a woman who has organised her entire life around the proposition that the bad thing will happen and what you do then is what matters. She is in her…
Phil McDaragh narrates his own chapter from the distant past, a first-person account of growing up in rural County Offaly in the early twentieth century. He is dead by the time the novel's present tense begins, killed by an early and catastrophic bleed to the lung that the autopsy would attribute to…
Felim is in his thirties, from a farming family in County Louth, and Nell's account of him is the novel's most sustained engagement with the specific mechanics of coercive behaviour. He appears at her door every few weeks from work, has a few drinks but not too many, stays for sex, and departs. He…
David Brocklehurst is English, in his late twenties or early thirties, privately educated at Durham School, and a teacher of the children of the international super-rich. He came up through the class system far enough to know what it was, and not far enough to belong anywhere he went. He lives in…
Three generations of Irish women live in and out of the shadow of a charming, destructive, gifted man. Phil McDaragh grew up in rural County Offaly, read himself out of poverty through a parish priest's library, and told the priest at twelve that he had been made not a priest but a poet. He was right. His poems are real: beautiful translations from the medieval Irish, nature lyrics that people love, a voice that makes whole rooms lean forward. He also left his wife when she was sick, had serial affairs, photographed women as raw material for verse, and treated the Greek poet Selma Karras, by Selma Karras's own account, very poorly. These facts and the gift are not separable. They arrive in the same blood.