March | 2023 | madame bibi lophile recommends

This my contribution to Reading Ireland Month 2023, aka The Begorrathon, running all month and hosted by Cathy over at 746 Books. Do head over to Cathy’s blog to check out all the wonderful posts so far!

Anne Enright’s The Green Road (2015) has been languishing in the TBR for many years. I’m trying to get to grips with the toppling monster (hahahaha) as I had to acknowledge that any gains made in my book-buying ban of 2018 had been completely undone. So I’m really pleased this year’s Begorrathon finally prompted me to pull it from the shelf.

The Green Road is divided into two parts, Leaving, and Coming Home. The first part considers one of four siblings in turn, from 1980 onwards. Hanna as a small tearful child; Dan gradually emerging from the closet in 1991’s New York; Constance having a cancer scare back home in County Limerick in 1997; Emmet pursuing aid work in Mali in 2002.

Through each of these sections we learn about the individual, but also gain an emerging picture of the family, including their tempestuous self-focussed mother Rosaleen and silent father Pat. This means that when they all return home at the behest of widowed Rosaleen in 2005, we have a good idea of each of them and it’s intriguing to see how Christmas dinner will play out when they are all in the same room. The focus will be on the five rather than extended family:

“The only route to the Madigans Christmas table was through some previously accredited womb. Married. Blessed.”

The adult children approach the event with no small degree of trepidation. Rosaleen is not an easy woman. Demanding without explicitly stating what her demands are, while judging her children quite harshly. She doesn’t approve of Constance’s weight gain:

“Rosaleen believed a woman should be interesting. She should keep her figure, and always listen to the news.”

Or Dan’s values, influenced by his work in the art world:

“For an utterly pretentious boy, he was very set against pretension. Much fuss to make things simple. That was his style.”

Yet she loves them deeply and they must attend, for Rosaleen is threatening to sell the family home:

“Rosaleen was living in the wrong house, with the wrong colours on the walls, and no telling anymore what the right colour might be, even though she had chosen them herself and liked them and lived with them for years. And where could you put yourself if you could not feel at home in your own home? If the world turned into a series of lines and shapes, with nothing in the pattern to remind you what it was for.”

In this interview Enright says: “I don’t do plottedness. I do stories, I do slow recognition.” This is exactly it. There isn’t a lot of plot in The Green Road but it is such a compelling read. The characterisation is complex and wholly believable, with all of the family not behaving entirely well nor entirely badly. The relationships are so delicately drawn, with their mix of love and frustration, familiarity and the unknown, wonderfully evoked.

“Emmet closed his eyes and tilted his face up, and there she was: his mother, closing her eyes and lifting her head, in just the same way, down in the kitchen in Ardeevin. Her shadow moving through him. He had to shake her out of himself like a wet dog.”

I read The Green Road over a few hours and was sorry to come to the end, but it was perfectly paced and a wholly satisfying read. Enright is such a wonderful writer, able to articulate the small moments in life that can have such an impact even when they are barely recognised. She perfectly captures the immensity of the every day.

“She looked to her son, she looked him straight in the eye, and for a moment, Emmet felt himself to be known. Just a glimmer and then it was gone.”

You can read an interview with Enright talking about The Green Road here.

To end, an Irish film about family which I’ve enjoyed in the last week is the Oscar-winning An Irish Goodbye. For those of you who can get iPlayer, it’s available and only 23 minutes long (warning: there is a dead hare in the road – not gory – in the first few seconds of this trailer);

This is my contribution to Dewithon 2023, hosted by the lovely Paula over at Book Jotter. Dewithon is an annual celebration of literature by and about writers from Wales – I’ve interpreted the brief pretty broadly this year as I’ve picked a novel by a Dutch writer, but it evokes its North Wales setting beautifully.

The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker (2010 trans. David Colmer 2012) is a quiet, melancholic novel, that shows without telling. I’d previously read The Twin by this author and found this similar in its themes of isolation and troubled relationships, and a refusal to judge its protagonists.

Emilie rents a cottage in rural Wales, fleeing from her husband in Amsterdam after her affair with a student at the university where she taught is exposed. Her backstory is revealed gradually, without explanations of how or why things happened. We just know how it is she has found herself somewhere unexpected and unplanned.

Bakker maintains a delicate balance between a recognisable portrait of this part of Wales, capturing its beauty without sentimentality; and then also having a slightly surreal, unpredictable element threatening to break through at various times too:

“It was just those geese; they were peculiar. Had she rented the geese too? And one morning a large flock of black sheep suddenly appeared in the field beside the road, every one with a white blaze and a long white-tipped tail. On her land. Who did they belong to?”

“Then she saw the mountain for the first time and realised what a vast landscape existed behind her house and how small an area she had moved in until that moment. […] The next day she bought an Ordnance Survey map at an outdoor shop in Caernarfon. Scale: 1-25,000.”

There is quite an emphasis on Emilie’s body and at first I approached this with some weariness, but it became apparent that this focus was there for a reason. Emilie seems to be very reliant on paracetamol…

Other characters cross her path: a slightly menacing neighbour, a doctor addicted to his cigarettes, a chatty hairdresser, as well as a young man, Bradwen, who turns up with his dog Sam and then never leaves. Emilie and Bradwen both seem to need something which the other provides, without anything being agreed or explicitly stated.

“I don’t think I want to know anything about him at all, she thought. He just has to be here.”

There is also a thread of tension as Emilie’s husband leaves home with a police detective in order to find her. His relationship with his in-laws provides some humour in what is otherwise quite a sombre novel (aside from some pithy observations on the vagaries of Escape to the Country):

“‘If you ask me, you’ve got plenty to hide,’ the mother said. ‘You turned out to be an arsonist, after all.’

The husband sighed.”

There is very little plot in The Detour but I found it a compelling read and whizzed through it in a couple of hours. Bakker trusts his readers not to need everything spelled out for them, and he creates complex, flawed characters that are presented as they are, without asking the reader to like or dislike them. He obviously has a great affection for Wales too, so I’m pleased to have read this for Dewithon 2023.

“That mountain, she thought, I have to keep an eye on Mount Snowdon, then I’ll know where I am.”

You can read an interview with Gerbrand Bakker about The Detour with Wales Arts Review here.

To end, this has absolutely nothing to do with the post, but I’m finally getting properly back to theatre-going after being somewhat intermittent since lockdown lifted. Recently I saw Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which I completely loved. Among a hugely talented cast, I thought Faith Omole particularly shone: