James Topham
posted 16 October 2007

It is an old fashioned idea, but one that endures, that literature’s main function is to show the truth. The truth found in literature is not obvious or banal, but concerns the secret nature of objects themselves. Literature casts about randomly and eventually stumbles upon the object of its discourse; be it a particular time, place, or the condition of humanity in general. It holds up these objects to the light and though they seem opaque, manages through some part-analytical, part-mystical process to produce a transparency in things. By ornamentation and linguistic play literature strips away the inessential dross of humanity and paradoxically, by gilding the lily, the author manages nevertheless to show the lily how it really is, or at least should be. This is literature’s only defence against its detractors: despite its fripperies and inconsequentialities it is nevertheless true.

Of course, in the words of one of our contemporary dramatic masterpieces, Avenue Q, it’s a fine, fine line. It is a fine line between the sort of gilding that endows objects with a transparent sheen, and allows us to see the truth within, and that which merely obfuscates all the more. Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Gathering, falls squarely on the wrong side of that line.

As I leafed through its pages of dense and often highly poetic text, I was too often repelled by the wrong note being struck, and hounded by the sense that what was written simply wasn’t true. The book’s profound conclusions were nothing more than pure elaboration with no concrete existence anywhere else but in the closed world of the book. Indeed, the one instance where Enright could be said to have captured the truth perfectly is with her treatment of mourning, and even this success is undermined. At the beginning of the novel, we learn the narrator’s brother has killed himself, forcing her to cross the Irish Sea to reclaim his body. This event sets off a train of thought that encompasses the events of their past lives, their growing older and apart, and eventually the end to the narrator’s marriage. This central voice – which dominates the novel to such an extent that one can pay attention to little else – brilliantly evokes a person in mourning and makes clear to us an inconvenient truth about grief (although I’m not entirely sure that this was Enright’s intention). Mourning makes us into boring people.

Enright captures the way mourning can make a perfectly fine human being into a perfect bore: the lurches in mood, the self-obsession, the introversion, the narcissism, the belief that mere proximity to the inevitable fact of death provides those who mourn with a view of life endlessly more profound than those around them. The only problem with this treatment is that Enright seems mistakenly to think her narrator’s meanderings are profound. She makes the error of identifying too strongly with her central character – a sin that is not terminal to a novel’s success unless the narrator is as unlovable and unsympathetic as this one. I really couldn’t stand the woman who was telling the story and so had no interest in her story at all.

The Gathering fits neatly into the contemporary mould; it is told in a disjointed fashion, with seemingly obligatory musings over the veracity of memory and the way that re-telling the past entirely changes it. But these musings come to no proper end and don’t deepen understanding of the story. Also fashionable is Enright’s concentration on the subtle truths found in the individual moment and the profundity of the debris-filled minutiae of life. And yet, none of these supposed truths seem true at all; instead the impression is of a writer who can only turn a phrase that grasps for a significance that eludes her. Her choice of style means the literary basics of plot, character and voice are somewhat overlooked. The narrator has a large family full of siblings, and yet this traditionally Irish family never comes to life beyond the stereotype, and individual members develop only into a coterie of names searching for substantial being. Liam, the suicidal brother, looms large but yet he too is a slight figure, lacking depth. His transformation from a freedom loving youth to a dissolute man, to drifter and vagrant is not affecting because we do not really know him; he, like all the characters, is too immersed in the singularity of the narrator’s voice to develop his own life-force, to truly become an individual in his own right.

The lack of emotion felt towards Liam’s demise and death is not helped by the novel’s twist, a supposedly shocking revelation. Here, I suppose, I should insert a ‘spoiler warning’, and invite readers to look away if they do not want to know the end. Yet anyone who has read any contemporary literature in the past twenty years would be hard-pressed not to see the looming spectre of child abuse on The Gathering’s horizon. The primal scene – Liam’s abuse by his grandmother’s landlord and lover – comes on inevitably. However, it is not treated with any robust analysis or original thought. Instead it merely stands as a symbol of wrong-doing, of unspeakable evil, an event that leaves the novel’s narrator feeling irredeemably tainted. But surely it is time to question the easy place paedophilia now holds in our literature as the immediately understandable short-hand representation of profound pain; itself a kind of pornography. Popular newspapers and ITV dramas are rightly challenged when they use this emotive issue in an exploitative way, to sell papers or a story – and perhaps the chattering classes should look at themselves and their literature and do the same.

This novel is on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize – the foremost prize for literary fiction in this country. One cannot help but feel despondent. For at least the last three years the prize’s shortlists have been dominated by books not at all dissimilar to Enright’s – chamber pieces, desperate to, in the famous words of William Blake, ‘see the world in a grain of sand’. They have been dominated, like Enright’s book, by style over substance, by lack of ambition and poverty of truth; they have replaced insight with elaboration. Despite the inevitable ‘difficult and unenviable task’ speech that will accompany the announcement of this year’s winner, the truth the Booker makes clear is that literature has never needed to be reborn more. And yet where this renaissance might come from is still unclear. Surveying the scene, one sees nothing but our reputedly best authors with their heads bowed towards the ground, desperately examining specks of sand, unaware the world is rolling by around them.

James Topham is editor of the online arts journal, the roundtable review, and the publisher of exciting new writing with his company Five Lines in the Sand.