By Carmel Bird
ESSAYS
Attention
Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape, $36.99
In 2007, Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker Prize with her novel The Gathering. She is also widely celebrated for her highly original essays, 24 of which are collected here. They are not set out chronologically, but appear according to subject matter. Attention, the title of the collection, is particularly apt since the essays survey, with blazing and dramatic emphasis, a range of urgent human problems, with a certain leaning towards works of literature. “Believe me,” writes Enright, “all I ever wanted to do was write like a man.” Yes, she will get your attention. You may flinch; she does not.
After a grim but amusing short introductory piece on how fiction by women has been historically overlooked, Enright launches energetically into an enthusiastic appraisal of Helen Garner’s recent How to End a Story: Collected Diaries. She gives the essay the marvellous title “I stab and stab”, a quote from Garner’s vivid description of her violent destruction of her unsatisfactory husband’s fountain pen, while attacking the proof copy of his novel. The collection is up and galloping, as the writer brings the cracks and flaws of life in this world clearly into view. Her prose is many-faceted – lyrical, brutal, whimsical – but always carrying the message from the heart of the writer to the very heart of the reader. Opinions are supported by deep research and lucid evidence.
The position of women in society is one of Enright’s preoccupations throughout the collection, which is divided into three parts. The first focuses on writers, the second on the matter of the human body, while the third covers a range of issues collected under the intriguing title Time. The reader is constantly swept from delight to horror, from the banal to the mysterious – all within the frank, personal, sparkling idiom of this daring writer’s paintbox.
A powerful flavour of Ireland breathes through the pages. There is “the endless over and back from authenticity to artifice of Irish art and Irishness”. You will learn that “clints and grikes” make up a limestone pavement, one being the stones, the other the fissures. Ireland, says Enright, has “more decent writers per acre than any other piece of land in the world”. And although there is a delicious early piece on Ulysses, much later in the book, the reader finds: “My heart fails me sometimes if I find myself obliged to talk about James Joyce.”
The essays in Enright’s Attention feature a lyrical frankness.Credit: Ruth Connolly
Having said that, the essay Difficulties with Volkswagon offers an account of childbirth in Ulysses, as delivered in 2010 to an audience of obstetricians. When you read this frank and startling essay, imagine what it must have been like to be one of those medicos. Contraception was not fully legal in Ireland until 1985. The place of childbirth in the lives of women is a subject that recurs throughout the collection. This is a fundamental and harsh topic, but the tone, so often, is gently personal, developing many droplets of irony along the way.
The sexual act and its panoply of meanings and consequences runs like a river throughout Enright’s essays. There is horrifying material here on the Irish Magdalen Laundries, and the revelations this century concerning the existence within their grounds of hundreds of bodies of unknown newborns. Enright refers to the Irish emphasis on virginity and conception and marriage as the “Reproduction Wars”. The presence of sexual abuse in families and within the Catholic Church is frequently foregrounded. In Alice Munro’s Retreat the reader finds, laid out in sickening detail, the matter of how Munro never acknowledged the hideous abuse performed by Munro’s second husband on her young daughter.
The collection begins in Australia and ends in Venice, having roamed far and wide, through the work of Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett, and many others, as Enright’s thoughts and life and career have swept along. There reigns a lyrical frankness throughout, and the words hold the reader in thrall and fascination. Readers who love Enright’s fiction will surely revel in the treasures to be found in the pages of Attention.
Carmel Bird’s latest novel is Crimson Velvet Heart (Transit Lounge).
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