Published in 2023, this is by Anne Enright (who won the Booker Prize in 2007 for a novel called The Gathering). No particular literary trail led me here (although, of course, the title reminded me of Wylding Hall). It was just a book that kept cropping up on my radar, and sounded good.

My audio-version, reflecting the way the novel is structured to express different characters' viewpoints, was read by Anne Enright herself, Aoife Duffin, Owen Roe, and Liza Ross. It was recommended as a good listen on AudioFile, and it is indeed another book that's a joy to tackle aurally, as the dialogue is superb.

For the first few minutes I wasn't quite sure, though... We start with 20-something Nell, who is just out of Trinity College Dublin, and trying to find her feet in the adult world. I was a little disoriented by her scattershot mode of narration and her bird noises (she likes birds, but that can only be a good thing).

But hang on, because you'll soon be reeled in... Nell's Gen-Z lifestyle is a masterpiece of artificiality (not that she has exactly chosen it, of course). A struggling warrior of the gig-economy, she produces formulaic online content about places she's never visited, and does stories for an actress/eco-influencer called Meg, who has Maltipoos (that's a kind of dog, not a disease -- I had to look it up).

Nell is also adjusting to independent life away from the all-enveloping presence of Carmel, her no-nonsense mother ("a very practical person", for whom "there is either a problem or no problem", and anything that doesn't fit in those categories must be something you're making up).

As if that were not enough, Nell has met Felim, a totally bad-news, all-red-lights-flashing bully. He's manipulative and full-on abusive, but Nell doesn't recognize (or acknowledge) these dangerous characteristics until she has been well and truly messed with.

So by now you're totally on board, accustomed to Nell's first-person narration, and highly brittle voice and style.


Moody Ireland, 1992

And then we switch to Carmel (fractionally distanced by the third person). Her father was the late Phil McDaragh, an Irish poet whose fame still redounds in a modest kind of way in the media and the community, but whose personal choices -- to abandon his wife (Terry) and daughters (Carmel and Imelda), and pursue another relationship with a younger, richer woman -- reverberate through the lives of those left behind like a bell heard up-close in a clock tower.

Carmel is a great character. She was quite young when her father walked out. Her mother was still recovering from a mastectomy. Phil actually "left" several times, one day returning to ransack their home in search of his watch... (Did he even rummage among their bed-resting mother's sheets? Or was he tucking her in? This is one of the memories that crop up in different variants.)

And Phil not only leaves, but leaves debts that Terry is responsible for.

After his departure, Carmel grows a few extra layers of protective shell: "She keeps a safe emotional distance between herself and everyone else, moving through the world like a survivor, relying on an unhealthy amount of mistrust and suspicion. She raises Nell alone. She takes boxing classes. She doesn’t do reassurance."

It stands to reason that she doesn't get on with Imelda (and there are also issues over the inheritance).

Motherhood is the sole area where Carmel lets her guard down, and Nell becomes her everything. We can feel the claustrophobia: "She had not been a good mother. Carmel knew that. All the love in the world would not make her a good mother. It was always such a wrangle. She could not hold her daughter, and she could not let her daughter go."

And in one of those interesting parallels that Enright floats but doesn't make a big meal of, Carmel at one point becomes interested in a guy called Ronan -- but drops him like a hot potato when he gets sick...



The narratives of Nell and Carmel are interspersed with poems and translations by Phil.

Phil... Where do you even start...? Georgia Phillips calls him the "quintessential Art Monster". He writes this beautiful poetry, all soft and sensitive, and he lives like a wrecking ball... He's a narcissistic, all-about-me, full-of-shite character, and these qualities are abundantly on display in an old TV interview that Carmel unearths online. Speaking of Terry, he says, all woebegone: "She got sick. Unfortunately. And the marriage did not survive." You wonder about the levels of self-deception necessary to produce such a man. And yet he's horribly, horribly believable.

I don't know Irish poetry well enough to locate Phil's work, but Elizabeth Lowry writes: "Examples of his verses -- Heaneyesque lyrics about Irish fauna and flora -- are scattered through the novel. These have all the sincerity of achieved art, but like Phil, their tenderness is an illusion. The most tender of all is a poem called The Wren, The Wren. Dedicated to Carmel, the daughter Phil abandoned, it gestures at her birdlike vulnerability and his own 'earthbound heart' -- now 'of her love’s weight / relieved'. On Carmel’s 16th birthday, philandering Phil sends her a letter urging her to turn her 'infinite gaze to the masters of the Uffizi'. The consolations of art, indeed. Years later Carmel finds a video of an interview with the dodgy old aesthete and suddenly recognises his dangerous 'doubleness': 'This is not just fake, I think. It’s an actual trap.'"

Again, there's a lovely parallel when Nell does in fact tour Italy, taking in the key galleries, and concluding her amusing analysis like this: "Many of the hundreds of penises in the Uffizi are very small and also anatomically incorrect."

Phil also treats us to a short account of his childhood. It's hard to know what to make of this. He had a tough life, for sure. So much religion everywhere. And so much violence (watching the killing of wrens and badgers, and jeering at a beautiful little girl whose father hacked her plait off because she'd been seen talking to a boy...). Yet here, too, Phil is giving us the poor-me act. Ah, all the things I've seen... How terrible... And he admits he joined in the jeering, even though the little girl had captured his childish heart. Kicking a female while she's down is obviously a deep-rooted practice.

Completing the narrative set is a much later letter to Nell from "the American Wife", Connie (who also tells her step-granddaughter about yet another woman Phil didn't treat very well...).

By the end of the novel, Nell has become much more grounded. We feel she has moved away from the edge of something terrible. She's saved enough money to travel (although the travel scenes are the novel's least convincing, and I don't think they're meant to be ironic). She's met David, who's a bit vanilla, but sound enough. Her relationship with Carmel is still scratchy, but they're communicating. Carmel is wary of David, but knows she has to give him a chance.

You feel they'll all be OK. Kind of. If nothing too awful tests them. But we're all so fragile. So marked by our upbringing.

So... A massively good book.

I'll give Lowry the last word: "Art as an illusion, love as a trap, the stranglehold of family ties: these are themes that Enright has already made her own. They are not just reprised here but honed to an essential honesty. Line for line, no one is more skilled than Enright at unfolding an unsettling scene."