‘Is it a love story, a family tragedy, a snide piece of social history, or an uneasy mix of all the above?’ – The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

The Forgotten Waltz is Enright’s first novel since her 2007 Booker-winner, The Gathering, so the pressure’s definitely on. I’m not sure that I’d call the new one a worthy successor – The Gathering‘s been damned by some for being too bleak, too woe-is-me, but I liked it, I found it poignant and believable, whilst The Forgotten Waltz didn’t quite convince me in the same way. And yet I’ve found it hard to shake; the narrator’s voice has stayed with me despite what I’d call a slight and rather forgettable plot. It shares with The Gathering a set of familiar themes – family, loss, grief, love and its complications – and both books star female protagonists who are reassessing their present lives in light of messy and secretive pasts. The Forgotten Waltz also jabs a deft right hook at the naivety of Ireland’s boom economy, as we watch the characters’ fiscal fortunes tumble alongside their emotional equanimity – so there’s a state-of-the-nation element to the novel that gives it a historical currency that hasn’t yet been much in evidence in Irish literature, or, at least, in well-reviewed mainstream Irish literature to date. All in, it’s a tricky book to parse – is it a love story, a family tragedy, a snide piece of social history, or an uneasy mix of all the above?

Let’s look at the plot: it’s the winter of 2009 when the novel opens, and Gina Moynihan’s left her husband, Conor, for her lover, Seán. Seán, in turn, has left his wife, Aileen, and his daughter, Evie. Gina begins to recall the circumstances under which they all met, analysing her attraction to Seán and the trajectory of their affair, her relationships with her husband, sister and mother; and Séan’s relationships with his own family – most specifically that with his young daughter, who’s twelve in the present-day of the narration, but only four at the time when Gina and Séan first met, and suffering from a mysterious illness. So the novel’s the story of an affair – an
old-fashioned topic, maybe, but placed in a very modern context, as Ireland’s financial dissolution provides the backdrop for the dissolution of two marriages. It’s slightly cheesy, the way the crash in property prices neatly lines up with the bottom falling out of Gina’s life; her career nosedives in the crash and she fails to shift her mother’s ‘two and a bit’ million-Euro house, while at the same time her mother dies, her sister snubs her for her infidelity, and she begins to see that her relationship with Seán will never equal his bond with his daughter. Cheesy, but convenient – the Irish economic collapse hasn’t been mined to death (yet) and Enright’s claiming her turf in Irish literature. She’s writing about the moneyed Irish middle-class – they live in Terenure and Enniskerry, they have holiday houses in France and flats
in Budapest, and they buy each other Hermés scarves. This isn’t (I think) a social group that’s featured very heavily in serious Irish literature to date. And Enright is, of course, going for serious. But does she achieve it? Well, I’m not sure that she does. Nothing much really happens in the book; the affair’s generic enough as these things go, and though Enright’s perhaps highlighting the banality of these flings in the same way that she’s reminding us of the hollowness of the property price bubble, that doesn’t in the end make for very tantalising reading. We know the gist of the love-story from the beginning (the affair, the problematic child, the ruminative narrator), so instead the driving force for the reader has to be Gina’s narration – how the story’s told. And Gina’s a classic unreliable narrator. She talks in circles, repeats herself, doubles back on her own narrative and re-examines the other characters at various points in the story (Aileen and Evie, in particular), revealing different information each time. We don’t hear the full story about Evie’s illness until the very end, for instance, though it’s hinted at throughout, and, likewise, Aileen’s presented quite differently from one chapter to the next – from a deserving bitch to an undeserving victim – even though, in this past-tense first-person narrative, the narrator’s always in possession of all the facts. Similarly, the language Gina uses is loaded with vague indeterminacies like ‘somewhat’, ‘something’, ‘whatever it was’, ‘I don’t know how long it lasted’, and ‘It was hard to tell’ – even though it turns out she does know how long things lasted and she’s happy enough to tell us a pretty convincing story, even if it isn’t an accurate one. If Enright hasn’t been swotting up on some Ford Maddox Ford (as well as Madam Bovary, of course), I’ll eat my English degree. But where Ford reveals machinations and malevolency, Enright’s just got a couple of suburbanites shagging each other in city-centre hotels while one of them worries about his sick child. It’s just not sordid or tragic enough to warrant the endless retreading.

Any yet, I can’t quite dismiss the book outright. Gina’s story isn’t unique or even very remarkable, but she could be seen as an everywoman stand-in for the type of Guardian-devouring, thirty-something readers that I reckon are Enright’s likely audience – and this means that her story is likely to strike a chord. It’s a normal person’s narrative, not a melodrama or a fantasy. And though her sneaky narration is a little irritating – the guarded and gradual release of fairly banal details – it does ring true, because that’s how real life plays out: in tiny deceptions and petty lies and small domestic rearrangements. I didn’t like Gina, and I didn’t really care whether she chose Conor or Seán, or whether herself and Evie could ever come to live comfortably together, or what Seán’s motivations were, but I believed in it all
– and that’s a triumph. I was convinced of the truth of the narrative despite not really being very interested in it.

Any Cop?: Eh – if you really like domestic intrigue you might find it worth the effort. It’s not her finest – I’d be very surprised if the Booker judges pounced on this one – but to give her credit, Enright’s still good at breaking down awkward family dynamics and how memory can be used to manipulate a narrative and its readers. And in places, it’s very funny; Gina’s sharp asides, bitching about her sister and her friends and the economic disaster, are biting. But still, the story’s pretty weak, the characters aren’t the most memorable, and the language isn’t especially innovative or startling. I’d pass on this and reread her earlier short stories – or The Gathering – instead.

Valerie O’Riordan