"The Gathering" by Anne Enright

"The Gathering" by Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize in 2007.

My second Booker Prize winner in a week, and this one again left me indifferent. I really couldn’t see what all fuss was about. Admittedly I haven’t read anything else on the long or shortlist for 2007, but surely something better could have been found?

Veronica’s brother commits suicide, he had become a drunk, but the root cause of his problems may have been being abused as a child, by a man deemed to be in love with their grandmother. She is bringing his body back from Brighton to Ireland for a funeral with the rest of the family. Gradually details are revealed about the abuse, about death and ultimately about his life.

My problems with this book are ones which individually would not be such an issue, but collected together made it hard to really involve myself with the book. Firstly I did not warm to the narrator at all, but added to that I don’t feel that any of the other characters felt real enough. I struggled to remember which of the brothers and sisters were which, and who was dead and who was alive. It was mentioned that the brother who’d committed suicide was charming but nothing in the anecdotes about him revealed him as such.

The idea of a family coming together at a funeral is a well-worn path and I’m certain it has been done better than this many times before.