Tinteán

Anne Enright: The Wren, The Wren, Penguin Random House UK, 2023

ISBN: 978152992290

RRP: $22.99

A Book Review by Frances Devlin-Glass

Anne Enright’s latest novel makes its pitch directly to women readers, and for me the novel constitutes a powerful analysis of how gender relations are shifting in Ireland (and no doubt elsewhere) and not exclusively in cisgender relations. Its focus is on three women in three different generations, beginning with a mid-twentieth-century (fictitious, or so we’re told) poet and his romantic, adoring woman/wife, Terry. The novel offers much more, to my thinking, than a study of patriarchal toxicity and a trauma transmitted through three generations, though, certainly, that is its powerful premise. It aims to explore how women express their sexuality in the new realities of post-ecclesiastical Ireland.

The novel is complexly structured as we move backwards and forwards in time between Carmel’s and Nell’s very different experiences of sex and love (both the subject of intense scrutiny and even debate in the novel). Each woman in the two succeeding generations returns to Phil, the patriarchal, sinister, toxic poet, and his decamping after his wife’s mastectomy, long before she has had a chance to recover, leaving her not only two daughters to care for but also his debts.

Enright has much fun at the expense of Phil’s use of poetry as a sexual lure. A central chapter in the book takes us into Phil’s experiences as a boy and they are horrific, and seemingly unrelated to what happens to his wife, daughters and grand-daughter, but they do serve to begin to unpack what is at the heart of male entitlement and cruelty in this novel. They concern a badger hunt (Enright interestingly names her source for this as a short story by Patrick Boyle) and his being marked out for priesthood by a priest because of the abject quality of his confessions of dark feelings(!). Although the child is under-age, he is routinely exposed to gross animal cruelty, ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ in the animal world. Another scene that is hard to bear is the one in which he joins with a hostile crowd jeering at his beloved Hanorah when her brutal father shaves her head for walking out with a boy (presumably himself). Phil’s youth is a dishonourable blooding in systematic abuse of power.

Men get a caning in this book, coming in for sustained satirical treatment and I can imagine it offering lots of potent discussion points in women’s bookgroups (is it significant that mixed-gender book groups are not the norm?). The only one spared is Nell’s latest lover, David, the last in a long line of men explored mainly for what they offer sexually, but even in his case, the writing is on the wall. His vacuous and boastful displays of his own prestige are clinically analysed by Enright’s ironising scalpel, and his fallibilities revealed (at least to the discerning and more experienced Carmel, if not yet to Nell). There is a suggestion in the final enigmatic chapter that men like birds are hardwired to be flashy and showy (like the Orange Chiffon or Australia’s own Blue Wrens in many different brilliant blue regalias which get a big guernsey in the novel) for the sake of their sexual input to the continuation of human life. Are they also hardwired to be emotionally brutal in pursuit of their dominance agendas (and to tolerate extreme physical violence in nature)? To be seemingly immune to women’s desire? Does women’s investment in the idea of love (sex and love are carefully contradistinguished in modern terms) invite dismantling?

Women are the powerhouse of this novel and demonstrably and progressively make meaning and lives independent of men, but are aware that they enjoy them and are drawn to them. We watch them negotiate their lives with men as the twentieth century rolls into the twenty-first. Carmel and Nell question and dismantle conventional assumptions made about gender and sexual behaviour. The least explored woman is Terry in the first generation, the poet’s wife, and there is something heartening about her transforming from the gravely ill and abandoned woman into the resurrected one. But she is shadowy, traumatised by her abandonment. The middle generation representative, Carmel, the closest child to the poet, will competently conceive a child by stratagem, raise her, and even contemplate a new lover but keep him at a distance from herself. Ronan reveals his sense of entitlement in much subtler ways than Phil. Men, it seems, in this fictional world seem both to need sex (and be more or less greedy in getting it), and their washing done when in extremis (i.e., in hospital). Despite Ronan’s undemanding nature, the washing is the last straw for Carmel.

The next and third generation, closer to our time, can contrive a living online, simultaneously travelling the world, experimenting sexually, and with theatrical brio. But female masochism is under the microscope in each generation, and especially in the third generation, in the shape of bondage narratives in Mal and Nell’s relationship. The hoary chestnut of what relationship there is between sex and love gets a fresh treatment in this novel and women do not get off scot-free. Female masochism and women’s openness to being discarded are dissected. Whereas Mal, airily waving a joint in the air, considers that love requires submission by two people and sex doesn’t (being presumably inherently a power play), it is the capacity of both Carmel and Nell to move out of toxic orbits, into self-reliance, and sometimes into new relationships that I found I wanted to celebrate in this novel. Phil’s horrific notion that all poetry is inspired by unrequited love is called into question; perhaps also Mal’s recasting of it in the following terms: ‘the trick on this planet is not to fall in love. Not ever. because if that happens you are literally fucked’ (p.202) would strike many women as appalling and reductive.

Somehow the sex drive (which is very proactive in Carmel and Nell) will perpetuate life, but women progressively gain confidence in their mothering and the community of other women. Each of Enright’s mothers acknowledges the inalienable otherness of their girl children. And this, to my mind, is not a regressive move. It does not stop the daughter and grand-daughter experimenting with relationships, but they are less a form of bondage than they were in a culture that did not allow divorce until late last century. As Nell puts it: ‘You go in the door. And it is what it is. And then you leave’ (p.203). Carmel and Nell have tougher carapaces than Terry, and ways of surviving financially as sole operators. And Nell illustrates that it is not a new phenomenon in her teasingly satiric internet journalism, NELL’S BELLS, a blog for the anxious traveller (pp.207-10), when she describes a series of paintings found in the Uffizi Gallery. The paintings enact tangential and unrealistic versions of womankind (and depict manly apparatus inaccurately too) and what she satirises is perhaps (did I ever think such an utterance could come from my mouth?) unthinking hyper-reverence for the Arts in their many forms. Fake sentiment whipped up by a self-serving Art Industry peopled by unscrupulous poets like Phil who take all for themselves. Nell’s blog is Enright at her funniest and she doesn’t miss an opportunity to focus on the female rage of Judith decapitating Holofernes and Salome requiring the head of the Baptist on a platter. We’re invited to join Nell in weeping over the ‘[f]ully dressed, unbeautiful, a little self-defeated’ self-portrait of Rembrandt as an older man. Life brings scars and Enright is in love with telling it as it is.

The novel tells its story with style and in new ways. It is peppered with references to birds and with poems about birds, sometimes new translations from ancient Irish poems by the novelist in consultation with poets like Paul Muldoon. These allusions to birds bind the novel into a very long Irish literary tradition stretching back to the Dark Ages, and I began to notice that birds crop up at emotional points in the narrative and to be functional in driving its knotty emotional content in a direction of seeing motherhood (and indeed all human life) in terms of continuity. At the end of the novel, we’re reminded that the birds pre-dated humans on Earth and still fly. The implication for mothers is clear. I’m not sure what it is for men other than that women need their sperm.

The title of this novel points to a really interesting literary gambit in the author’s use of the St Stephen’s Day Wren Boy rituals, whereby boys kill wrens, skewer them on poles and go door-to-door to beg for money for burial services. For me, as a parable, it is open to radically incommensurable readings: does it cast light on a centuries-old ritual of silencing (it is after all a dead wren that is proclaimed ‘the king of the birds’), or does it celebrate the ingenuity of the wren which hides under the eagle’s wing in a contest to win the title of the king of the birds and succeeds against the odds in flying higher. Both readings work well for the novel. Phil’s ‘kingship’ in the world of poetry is indeed won at the expense of his wife and children and indeed a series of women; equally, the little wren demonstrates its ingenuity in claiming its prize over what custom might deem the dominant bird. I’m reminded of Biddy the Hen’s anthem in Finnegans Wake:

Lead kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year be it fly, be it moult be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest….she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluffballs safe through din ang danger…

Indeed, what an astonishment when Biddy pushes back against the ‘wisdom’ of the ages.

This is an impressive novel by a writer at the top of her game, writing fiction that ventures into new territory in brave and terrifying ways. It has also to be said that as well as being often shocking in what it addresses, this book is often very funny. It does make demands on a reader but rewards her too. I think her ideal reader is an older woman, but having said that, the contemporaneity of her subject-matter will also resonate with younger women as well, perhaps for different reasons. It’s a subtle book. Enright doesn’t tell you what to think, allows her bold characters to err, and invites you into a newly-fashioned discussion about the age-old conundrum, love and sex.

Frances Devlin-Glass

Frances taught Literary Studies and Feminist Literature at Deakin University, and is the founding Director of Bloomday in Melbourne, and a member of the Tinteán editorial collective.