The Green Road by Anne Enright

My Irish roots occasionally lead me to wander into stories of the “Olde Sod.”  When one of those stories comes from the quill of a Man Booker Prize winner, I have no hesitation at all.  Ann Enright’s 2015 novel, The Green Road, tells the story of a family dispersed around the globe. 

Rosaleen Madigan is the matriarch of her four children.  Dan announces he wants to become a priest, and this drives his mother into a funk which last over a month.  She is unable to get out of bed.  Constance – the only sibling to remain in Ireland -- marries Dessie, a local real estate developer, and they have three children, Donal, Rory, and Shauna.  Emmet wanders the globe doing good deeds in impoverished nations.  He is in a relationship with Alice – a fellow activist -- which breaks apart as the novel begins.  Hannah is the youngest.  She is a film actress who lives in Los Angeles with Hugh and their infant child.  This might seem an often used scenario, but Enright delves into what drives this family apart with a rather interesting prose narrative.

Dan moves to New York and engages in some risky relationships.  Constance is driven to distraction by the demands of her mother.  Emmet loses Alice who takes off for a distant area of the globe.  Hannah is an alcoholic, who suffers from depression following the birth of her child.  Complications to all these problems arise from Rosaleen’s obliviousness to the truth about her family.

Enright delves into the turmoil in the lives of each of these children.  For example, she writes about Constance, who has discovered a growth in her breast. “If she had gone to New York she would not have worried about cancer now.  She would have been jogging for years, living on wheatgrass, she would have a yoga ‘practice’, maybe even a personal trainer, and her children would be – she could not imagine what her New York Children would have been like – whiny, at a guess, that mixture of entitlement you saw in city kids.  Her children would be fewer.  Her children would not exist.  Their souls would call to her from the eyes of strangers, as though they’d found some other way into the world.  She would turn in the street to look at them twice: who are you?”  (87).  Enright alludes to the allure of exaggerated ideas of the new world tinged with realism and some wishful thinking.  My introduction to Enright was her 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, which dealt with similar themes – family relationships, love, sex, and the Irish Zeitgeist.

Each chapter is devoted to one of the family members.  In one, Rosaleen wanders around her home nattering about the past.  Ann writes, “The kitchen was the easiest room in the house, with the heat of the range and two windows, one facing south and the other west.  But it was November, and there were days when she filled a hot water bottle just to make it down the hall.  Outside she had a winter flowering cherry set against the silhouetted winter branches, but it would not bloom for many weeks yet.  Meanwhile, she had no evergreens, for being too depressing, and every November she thought about a blue spruce, or those needle-thin Italian pines, and every November she decided against.  It was an Irish garden.  A broadleaf garden, except for the monkey puzzle at the front of the house.  Straggly now – there were dead and half dead branches for fifty feet or more, but it was her father’s tree and nothing gave her more pleasure.  The monkey puzzle was allowed, as Dan used to say” (145).

Ann Enright’s novel, The Green Road, with nearly rare expletives and a few sexual references, is an absorbing, interesting look at modern Ireland.  The ending is tense as the clan gathers for what may be their last Christmas together.  5 stars

--Chiron, 6/25/15

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Irish writer, Colum McCann, spins an engrossing tale of New York in the early seventies and beyond.  The central idea of Let the Great World Spin orbits around Phillipe Petit’s walk on a cable strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.  A disparate group of characters coalesce, and all are touched by the daredevil stunt.

McCann, an internationally known bestselling author, lives in New York with his family.  He teaches creative writing at Hunter College.  He is the author of four critically acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories.  He has won numerous literary awards in Ireland.  Esquire magazine named him one of the “best and brightest” young authors.  His short film, Everything in this Country Must, received an Oscar nomination in 2005.  His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review.  After reading this novel, I see another collection of an Irish writer in my future.

Each section of the novel takes on a voice of its own.  In one section, John Corrigan has left Ireland to work in the slums of New York.  He lives a Spartan existence among burned out, abandoned buildings in the Bronx.  His neighbors are drug addicts, alcoholics, hookers, and petty criminals.  He has developed a relationship with these people.  He does not judge them in any way, but rather he offers them a helping hand anyway he can.  His older brother, Ciarran, emigrates from Ireland, and is horrified by the conditions of his brother’s life.  McCann writes:

“I’d been in the South Bronx for a week.  It was so humid, some nights we had to shoulder the door closed.  Kids on the tenth floor aimed television sets at the housing cops who patrolled below.  Air mail.  The police came in, clubbing.  Shots rang out from the rooftop.  On the radio there was a song about the revolution being ghettoized.  Arson on the streets.  It was a city with its fingers in the garbage, a city that ate off dirty dishes.  I had to get out.  The plan was to look for a job, get my own little place, maybe work on a play, or get a job on a paper somewhere.  There were ads in the circulars for bartenders and waiters, but I didn’t want to go that way, all flat hats and micks in shirtsleeves.  I found a gig as a telemarketer, but I needed a dedicated line in [my brother’s] apartment, and it was impossible to get a technician to visit the housing complex: this was not the America I had expected.” (32)

John shrugs off Ciarran’s concerns, and continues on his way with a smile.

This emotional and taut story really captured me.  Reading about the preparations for the tight-rope walk gave me the chills.  I have a fear of heights, and as I read those pages, I had to grip the arm of my chair -- the sensation of falling was that intense.  A wonderful story, a dazzling array of individuals from the South Bronx to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, McCann has blended all these characters into a splendid story of faith, courage, charity, love, hatred, and downright meanness.  I can’t wait to see what else McCann has to offer.  5 stars.

--Chiron, 8/19/13

Athena by John Banville

We have all had experiences of entering a dream-like state.  We wander and take in the scenery and the people, while we think about the day behind and the day ahead.  The state seems vivid, but it also seems strangely “other.”  I frequently have these while taking my early morning walks, and suddenly, I am on the last leg of the route home.  This matched exactly the sensation I felt when reading John Banville’s 1995 novel, Athena.

Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea.  I collect this outstanding series of novels, and I first encountered Banville while working my way through the 46 winners of the prize first awarded in 1969. 

Mr. Morrow seems a lost soul.  He has a mysterious past involving the police, prison, and some artwork.  His Aunt Corky is at death’s door – and has been for a few years.  He reluctantly visits her from time to time.  A shady character approaches him and asks him to examine some paintings and determine whether or not they are genuine.  He also meets a beautiful young woman and begins a rather torrid affair.  In fact he begins to obsess over this woman, and visits her at every opportunity.  In the backdrop of this novel are a series of brutal murders in London, and some other mysterious characters that seem to follow Morrow.

Banville describes one visit to his aunt in hospital:

“The bed, the chair, the little table, the lino[leum] on the floor, how sad it all seemed suddenly, I don’t know why, I mean why at just that moment.  I rose and walked to the window and looked down over the tilted lawn to the sea far below.  A freshening wind was smacking the smoke-blue water, leaving great slow-moving prints, like the whorls of a burnisher’s rag on metal.  Behind me Aunt Corky was talking of the summer coming on and how much she was looking forward to getting out and about.  I had not the heart to remind her that it was September” (30-31).

The seven paintings Morrow is asked to authenticate are described and all seem to involve mythological creatures chasing women.  Each chapter after the first, begins with a short essay on one of the paintings, and these essays gradually devolve into self-reflections by Morrow on the connection between the figures in the painting and his lover.

The more of Banville I read the more convinced I become that he is a great Irish writer and deserves a place at the table with Joyce, Becket, Shaw, and Wilde.  Athena is rated R for a few explicit scenes and some mild violence, but it is an absorbing and enchanting thriller/love story.  5 stars

--Chiron, 7/9/13

Wild Decembers! by Edna O’Brien

Edna O’Brien was described by Jonathan Yardley, a reviewer for The Washington Post, as, “among the leading English-language novelists of the day.” My fondness for Irish Fiction led me to O’Brien, and the novels I have read are thoroughly enjoyable works. The reviewer also wrote, “Wild Decembers proceeds toward a climax that is Irish to the quick, violent, and sad and, in a strange way, beautiful. Just like the novel itself.” That is what I like about O'Brien – “Irish to the quick” with beautiful writing.

Wild Decembers! tells the story of Joseph Brennan and Michael Bugler. Joseph has a prosperous farm and lives with his sister, Breege. He not only farms and runs livestock on his own land, but he also rents out land from adjoining farms for his cattle and to cut peat for heating. Michael Bugler left Ireland for a sheep station in Australia, but has returned home with a small fortune and bought a run-down farm. He immediately begins making improvements, including the purchase of a tractor, which is noisy and bothers the quiet of the villagers, who cling to the old ways of farming. Michael falls in love with Breege and decides he will fix up the estate for her.

As Michael buys up the grazing and peat cutting rights Joseph’s family has informally held for years, tension grows between the men, and suddenly lawyers and lawsuits abound – almost like Dickens’ Bleak House.
I spent some time during Spring Break on a farm, and I could see farming is hard, hard work. O’Brien writes,

“[Michael] had read the books on turf cutting and consulted Thady, an old man who had once been the fastest slanesman in the country. Earnestly he had listened, then watched as Thady brought in a rusted slane from an outhouse and, using the kitchen floor as a bog, enacted the stripping off of the top skin of grass, then marking out the bank, and with the slane having to dig and dig, doing it slantwise so as to cut the sods straight.

“In the kitchen it had been an amusement, but out there in the heat and dryness, insects crawling over him, his back breaking from having to bend and push in an unaccustomed way, he realized he had never worked so hard or so gruelingly and yet so satisfyingly.” (124).



The disputes and law suits escalate and Joseph faces ruin after losing at every turn. Then he discovers Breege and Michael have been secretly meeting.

Edna O'Brien has written over 20 novels, and Wild Decembers! is my third but by no means, my last. 5 stars.
--Chiron, 3/12/13

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle

Generally, I have a pretty happy life. A wonderful family, a great job, lots of friends, so not much really comes to my attention which I abhor. However, there are a few things. Cockroaches are one. I have been known to cross the street rather than share the largest pavement with one of these vermin. Lima beans, Brussel sprouts, and cooked spinach top my most detested food list. But one thing really bothers me, because I cannot understand how it occurs or how it is allowed to continue to recur. That is abuse. I include, of course, abuse of children, the abuse of animals, but one of the most disturbing examples in this category is the abuse of women. I also find it difficult to understand how woman can put up with such behavior after even a single transgression. After reading Roddy Doyle’s novel, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, I now have a smidgen of understanding this terrible, terrible behavior.


Roddy Doyle won the Man Booker Prize in 1993 for the hilarious Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha. Since then, I have collected most of his novels, because of my fondness for Irish fiction. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is anything but hilarious.

It starts out all full of flowers, birds, rainbows, and Leprechauns, and the poverty and hard times afflicting Ireland. Then it takes a sinister turn, when Charlo punches his wife, Paula, and knocks her to the ground.
Gradually, Doyle reveals the true nature of Paula’s relationship with her husband. As the novel progresses, Paula remembers more and more of the 17-year long ordeal he inflicted on her. Numerous times, she thinks, “I love him. He loves me. He can’t help it. He’ll stop if I only behave.” Charlo threw that first punch because he asked for a cup of tea, and she responded, “Make your own feckin’ cuppa tea!” Later she imagines if she had simply made that cup of tea, he would never have hit her and the abuse would never have begun. In short she continually blames herself for the abuse.

I will not even begin to list the examples of the abuse Charlo inflicted on his wife. Frankly, it was a bit difficult to read – it literally turned my stomach. On the other hand, I could not stop reading it mesmerized me that much.

--Chiron, 3/1/13