When I sleep with Tom … what he wants, what my husband has always wanted, and the thing I will not give him, is my annihilation. Every time he does this, a tiny bit sticks to him. Hegarty is one of a large clan, and is obsessed with sex and penises in particular, her self-loathing in the sexual act matched only by her loathing for her wealthy husband Tom (“Tom moves money around, electronically. “I saw a man with tertiary syphilis at Mass, once,” is how the narrator, Veronica Hegarty, opens one chapter, and it sums up the sexuality and Irishness of The Gathering neatly. But it is a family story, and as we go through the pages and remember that happiness writes white, and that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (“I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive”), we realise that we might well add Storm to the end of the title. Enright has an ear for a memorable title – The Portable Virgin, The Wig My Father Wore – so at first sight The Gathering seems a little banal. I finally picked it up permanently when it was longlisted last week for the Booker Prize. 16 October 2007: The Gathering has won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007Īnne Enright’s The Gathering had enthusiastic reviews when it was published earlier this year, and I picked it up in the shops and put it down again more than once.
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