Longlisted for the 2015 Man
Booker Prize
I wasn’t familiar with Anne Enright’s work before I
was given The Green Road as a gift.
The synopsis sounds wonderful:
From internationally acclaimed
author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland's
Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture,
compassion and selfishness―a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we
strive to fill them.
Spanning thirty years, The
Green Road tells the
story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either
coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four
children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in
Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult,
wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the
proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling
that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
A
profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the
relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The
Green Road is
Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.
I even saved it until I had to spend some time in an
airport. It starts out pretty good, but quickly goes downhill in my opinion. The
beginning and the ending are the best parts.
The story starts in 1980 with Hanna, seemingly the
youngest of the Madigan brood. Mom Rosaleen has taken to her bed after the
oldest, Dan, announces he wants to become a priest. The story then shifts to
focus on Dan. It is 1991. He is living in New York. Not sure what his
occupation is as the story is more about his life as a gay man and the AIDS
epidemic more than anything. The next section focuses on Constance, stilling
living in Ireland, in 1997. She is at a hospital to determine if the lump in
her breast is cancer. The next shift is on Emmet, who is, I think, a missionary
in Mali in 2002. As I read these sections, I felt that Enright kept the reader
at arm’s length. Then the story jumps back to the Madigan home for Christmas 2005.
The father, who we don’t see much of, died ten years
(I think) earlier. Rosaleen is the same melodramatic matriarch that she was in
Hanna’s section. There are no explanations of how the four ended up like they
did, which made me feel disconnected to the character’s problems.
I give The
Green Road 2 out of 5 stars.
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