Carmel is a single mother and the daughter of a semi-famous Irish poet, Phil McDaragh, now deceased, who walked out on his family when Carmel was twelve. Nell is Carmel’s daughter, in her early twenties when the novel opens, and in the midst of a compulsive, abusive relationship. The book oscillates between the two women’s stories, with Phil’s legacy not quite shadowing, but certainly floating alongside, the twin narratives; as we read, these strands echo and reflect one another, creating a shimmering, resonant portrait of family legacies of love and harm and beauty and fierce independence.
Now, lest that sound like McGahern redux (not that there would be much of a problem there), it’s got to be said that this is an acerbic book: sharp and funny, acutely aware of the present moment and correspondingly free from nostalgic sentiment – indeed, that kind of reverence is neatly skewered in Enright’s portrayal of Carmel’s sister Imelda, the performatively long-suffering carer for their mother, and keeper of their father’s archives and legacy and (to Carmel’s rage) the family home. Nell’s sections are more akin, in their engagement with the contemporary (online culture, sexual politics, precarious employment), to the work of Patricia Lockwood or Emma-Jane Unsworth; while Carmel’s are largely retrospective (we learn about her childhood, her running away to Europe, her decision to bear a child alone), she’s more concerned with the fluidity and uncertainty of memory and storytelling than she is with dwelling in days gone by. Phil’s brief appearance is an interlude of pastoralism, folk-tales, boyhood in the countryside, priests and nature, the self-mythologising of the Great Man; Carmel’s story, and, later, Nell’s, give us an alternate view. In that respect, The Wren, The Wren is a sharp riposte to Irish literary nostalgia and all the patriarchal veneration and elision of woman and family and care and inconvenience that this necessarily involves. Phil, in this version, builds his legend on a base of gendered abuse and neglect; in the present day, Nell’s relationship with Felim unwittingly re-enacts her family’s past, and that family’s future – Nell is ‘the last of the line’ – circles around the nature of its relationship with these dynamics.
And yet, it’s not quite that simple. Phil’s poetry – his translated versions of old Irish poems – litter the text, from literal reprints, to the refrains that flit through Carmel’s mind (she is, to him, the titular ‘wren’), to a line Nell has tattooed along her collarbone; while it’s politically disengaged, it’s also beautiful, and this is something Enright’s characters are attentive to in ways that aren’t necessarily as insular as Phil’s efforts. Nell is as fascinated by nature as the grandfather she never met; while his elegiac treatment of the Irish countryside can be read as a refusal to engage with the politics of the day, hers is bound up with an awareness of scarcity and extinction patterns, and an acknowledgement of the necessity for humans to attune themselves to world at large. If Phil is a chronicler of the local, Nell, and Carmel before her, bears witness to the global: Nell, in fact, retraces her mother’s footprints, and her grandfather’s obsessions, and rewrites both with the sensibility of her generation to the connectedness of past and present, near and far.
And: Enright is offering us a more complex narrative about violence and survival than we might expect from a book about oppressive old male artists. Both Carmel and Nell escape; they both thrive, in fact, as do other, more peripheral characters, the women of Phil’s life beyond his marital home. Phil is both a great talent and a ‘creep’; venerated, but not well recognised, an avatar of a bygone world. Nell can name her own traumas; Felim is not the oversized figure in her own imaginary that he might once have been.
Any Cop: A beautifully delicate and sharp exploration of the legacy of the past: Enright on top form.
Bookmunch 