Dislocated lives unravelled in Enright's sweet 16
Unsettling intelligence combines with a superb use of language in 2008 Novel of the Year winner Anne Enright's latest offering, writes Mary Warnock
Taking Pictures
Anne Enright
Vintage, €19.75
It would seem that all the superlatives have been used up to describe Anne Enright's Man Booker prize-winning The Gathering and rightly so for that extraordinary piece of work. Well, she's only gone and done it again. In a canny move, Ms Enright has brought out, as the never easy follow-up, a collection of her short stories.
Short stories, in this reviewer's opinion, are the hardest of literary forms -- "exquisitely difficult" as VS Pritchett put it -- and a real test of an author's skill and authority. Unlike the novel, there is no real development in the short story and there is no place to hide. Added to this, the Irish are, after all, masters of the genre and there is a lot to live up to.
Yet again, Anne Enright manages to astonish us with her unsettling intelligence and superb use of language in this collection of 16 uncomfortable but compelling tales of love, hate and loneliness and all that comes in between. Each one is like a perfectly crystallised gem -- sharp, unique and almost breathtaking in its audacity, for Ms Enright does not seek to console us -- there is certainly compassion there, as there will be in all great writing, but nowhere is there sentimentality. To be brutally frank, Enright is brutally frank. She also has a marvellous sense of humour, which had me laughing out loud even at the grimmest moments.
In Pale hands I loved, beside the Shalamar a woman suffering from an agonising migraine muses, "There is something unbelievable about a migraine. You lie there and can't believe it. You lie there, rigid with unbelief, like an atheist in Hell". Good writing doesn't get much better than this. All 16 short stories deal with women and their various concerns and we know Ms Enright can write women well, as witnessed in the redoubtable Eliza Lynch -- but most of the women here are unsettled or dislocated in some way. In Pillow, a shuddery little tale with a nasty pay-off an Irish girl finds herself isolated and lonely in an American college dorm.
In Honey a woman, liberated by the death of her mother, contemplates a fling with an unpleasant work colleague. It is a beautifully observed piece intertwining sex, death and guilt and the way we sometimes use sex as a means of obliterating grief.
When Catherine, the story's heroine, finally comes to her senses the writing is almost lyrical -- she comes across a swarm of bees with her putative lover, "It was like watching some slow liquid spill and then unspill itself; honey making its way back into the jar".
At times, her prose is simply dazzling. In the drily humorous Shaft a hugely pregnant woman finds herself stuck in a lift with a sentimental American who finally blurts out to her, "It's the most beautiful thing in the world". (Anyone who read Making Babies will imagine how much truck she had with this.) Marriage, good and bad is a common theme and in Taking Pictures, the title story, a woman observes with despair her inevitable metamorphosis into coupledom as she hosts a drunken and boring dinner party. Taking Pictures is a superb collection of stories. Anne Enright is a writer simply incapable of artifice or affection.
This world of women -- sad, unfulfilled and lonely-and their disjointed, squeamish relationships with the world around them is observed with a ruthless eye but never without an open heart and a dry, sly sense of humour. She is also an accomplished stylist -- perhaps one of the best around and, although comparisons are odious, she has been compared favourably with some of the great women writers of past generations, and justifiably so. (She could give some male writers a run for their money too).
I believe all the superlatives have been used up now.
