Join webchat with award-winning author ANNE ENRIGHT and discuss May book of the month THE GREEN ROAD on TUESDAY 24 May, 9-10pm

[TillyMumsnetBookClub]

Winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2015, our May Book of the Month THE GREEN ROAD was also longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Award and is currently on the shortlist for the Baileys Prize (announced 8th June). This may all feel familiar to its author, Anne Enright, who won the 2007 Booker Prize with THE GATHERING and in 2015 was made the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Enright's novels are fantastically well-crafted, eloquent and funny - even when they are quite bleak in subject matter. She is also an expert in dissecting family dynamics, and at examining their constant pull of complex emotions. In THE GREEN ROAD, we meet four siblings from County Clare who are set on very different paths. Their stories are tracked over 1980s to present day, across different countries, until they are all called back for Christmas in the family home, by their overpowering and manipulative mother. She announces she will be selling the house, which propels them into a crisis. Each character is beautifully realised, and their difference from each other as adults is contrasted with the sudden immersion into childhood stereotype and ingrained patterns once they are all reunited. What is special about Enright's handling of the family saga is her gift for the perfect sentence. She finds unexpected adjectives, brilliantly exact description, the spot-on emotion. Her writing is lyrical but always unsentimental. There is pleasure in reading every paragraph, and an enormous wisdom throughout the pages.

To find out more, go to our book of the month page, where you can also apply for a free copy - just fill in your details on the book of the month page and we'll post here to let you know when the copies have gone. If you’re not lucky enough to bag one of those, you can always get a Kindle edition or paperback copy here

We are thrilled and delighted that Anne will be joining us to answer your questions about The Green Road, all her previous award-winning novels and her stellar career on Tuesday 24 May, 9-10pm. Please feel free to discuss the book here throughout the month and then come and meet Anne on the night, and ask her a question or simply tell her what you think of her books.

Anne, thank you for answering my question again! :) I see the potential for growth and change within Dan, I think his marriage to Ludo could be the making of him and I see that Constance too is self-aware and Emmet realises his inability to love but Hanna seems much more damaged. Her postnatal depression and drinking were truly terrifying.

Hope I'm not posting too much!!!

@CuteHoor

I'd actually like to put it on record that my family make the Madigans and the Hegartys look like the Oxo Family .

Can I ask another question, if you have time and inclination, as you were so gracious about the review question? Was having the setting of The Green Road (or some of it, anyway) in rural Clare a conscious decision that came early on in the writing or planning? I always think of you as a quintessentially Dublin writer, and while it's dopey to assume Things Are Different For Culchies, I sometimes do feel that rural Ireland, or at least its more thinly inhabited bits, is a different world to the cities. Or at least you end up moving into different writers' terrain.

Not that Edna O'Brien owns rural Clare, or anything.

Thank You Cute Hoor. Ownership IS a fraught question in the irish tradition. I started writing the book in a little house overlooking the Flaggy Shore and the landscape took over. The decision was made for me, I think - I was quite reluctant. But my father grew up in a similar house, just near Kilkee, I spent all my holidays down there, and when I told him we were going to Clare he said "Oh little Corca Bascainn, the wild, the bleak, the fair" Then he said the whole poem. I had no choice, don't you see?

:D Love it TillyMumsnet!

Tillymumsnet, I think you should write the sequal!

Anne, I understood Hannah's drinking to be down to post natal depression, missing her old life and not coping the drudgery that goes with being a SAHM to a small child. Is that correct?

@TillyMumsnetBookClub

I agree about the fresh start and sense of possibility, those tiny steps forward that occur after a crisis.

I'd like to see The Madigan Christmas: One Year On.

Everyone is at Dan and Ludo's for cranberry cocktails and turkey risotto.
Constance is wearing skin tight new body-con dress; Hanna has embraced clean eating and spirilazed courgette; Emmet is with new girlfriend, a high flying African merchant banker; Rosaleen has given all the present money to Oxfam to buy goats.

Well the goats is spot on - the cards would be Trocaire. I can't see Constance in Herve Leger, but another Eileen fisher would be nice. And Emmet should go back to Alice, don't you think? As for Hannah. The baby has stopped crying. The baby is walking maybe, hanging on to the table top, and Hannah is going to be ok.

@atrociouscook

.........yes, I think I know what you mean. Ireland has a kind of inferiority complex brought on, I should think, by years of put down by the British, but I think the Irish sense of humour always wins out. I think you could write a very funny novel set in Ireland today - there's a challenge, to write an Irish novel which isn't all doom and gloom!

I keep telling you, I have a tragic muse. Will write gloomy novel set in Berlin, set in Hull, set in... there are so many possibilities really. Croydon. Bucharest. Illinois.

I wasn't certain about the reunion with Alice. I thought that Emmet might just try out the possibility of commitment with her, like a guinea pig, before moving on to someone a little bit less sentimental!

it's true now Dan doesn't have to live in Toronto to marry Ludo. An Ireland where everyone a little bit different doesn't have to either move away or stay and live a like and be miserable presents a new challenge to Irish novelists

So glad to hear that Hanna is going to be ok! :) And Emmet should definitely go back to Alice. We are all assuming Constance makes it through the cancer, which is the only future I can countenance.

Oh, OK, if you insist. I'm sure it will be a very good read wherever it's set - thank you for coming.

@Belo

Tillymumsnet, I think you should write the sequal!

Anne, I understood Hannah's drinking to be down to post natal depression, missing her old life and not coping the drudgery that goes with being a SAHM to a small child. Is that correct?

Hannah's drinking has to stop, there is no doubt about that. I don't use words like 'depression' about characters - if you have a diagnosis that makes it all, and them, more manageable somehow. I don't know if Hannah's mood has a hormonal basis. I do know that having a baby brings all her baggage clattering down on her. It brings her own baby-self, with all its terrors and sense of abandonment, right back in the room.

Thanks, Anne. (Of course scratch a Dubliner and you'll find someone who's a generation removed from some two-house townland, as you say. Or about ten minutes, in my case.)

Are you involved with your translations at all? I read John McGahern in French recently (long story, got stuck in an airport without enough to read), and he's huge in France, in part I think because he has a really good translator, and I think worked on some of the translations himself. Novelist friends of mine claim to be huge in the Netherlands or Portugal or wherever.

Are you involved with any of that, and do you have a sense of your overseas readership outside of English?

I'll shut up now.

Interesting take Tillymumsnet and highly plausible!

@searchingforcalm

So glad to hear that Hanna is going to be ok! :) And Emmet should definitely go back to Alice. We are all assuming Constance makes it through the cancer, which is the only future I can countenance.

no guarantees, I am afraid

Hannah's ok! Yay!

Croydon! It is untapped and there for the taking. I would love to read your take on Croydon.

@GrumpyMcGrumpFace

it's true now Dan doesn't have to live in Toronto to marry Ludo. An Ireland where everyone a little bit different doesn't have to either move away or stay and live a like and be miserable presents a new challenge to Irish novelists

Yes, that happened while I was writing too. Sometimes the timing is nice xxa

Anne, why did you write about 1980s NYC gay scene, and the cruel illness that was so very frightening? I find the dawn of HIV must have been petrifying as a sexually active gay man and loved your take on it. Hugely moving.

@TillyMumsnetBookClub

I wasn't certain about the reunion with Alice. I thought that Emmet might just try out the possibility of commitment with her, like a guinea pig, before moving on to someone a little bit less sentimental!

Hard to say with Emmet, he is a cool customer. But I think he really wants babies now, and Alice would be just right for all that

"Hard to say with Emmet, he is a cool customer. But I think he really wants babies now, and Alice would be just right for all that"

that's more than a cool customer, that is ice cold and calculating! A scary character.

Cutehoor that is interesting about McGahern. I adore his work - and it must be very hard to translate. I'd imagine it's hard for an author to just let a translation happen - and yet they must have to all the time, given no one speaks ALL the languages.

@Givemecoffeeplease

Anne, why did you write about 1980s NYC gay scene, and the cruel illness that was so very frightening? I find the dawn of HIV must have been petrifying as a sexually active gay man and loved your take on it. Hugely moving.

Thank you so much. I lived through that time in Dublin (I was working in the media) and it always seemed sad to me that it was so little written about it al. So many of the people who might have written the story died, of course, and the survivors were not under any obligation to go back there. I wanted to honour the courage I saw then, the love and the sense of a community working together in a time of crisis. It was important for me to hit the right tone.

@CuteHoor

Thanks, Anne. (Of course scratch a Dubliner and you'll find someone who's a generation removed from some two-house townland, as you say. Or about ten minutes, in my case.)

Are you involved with your translations at all? I read John McGahern in French recently (long story, got stuck in an airport without enough to read), and he's huge in France, in part I think because he has a really good translator, and I think worked on some of the translations himself. Novelist friends of mine claim to be huge in the Netherlands or Portugal or wherever.

Are you involved with any of that, and do you have a sense of your overseas readership outside of English?

I'll shut up now.

Yes I do.

I am sorry you did not like the characters. Sometimes a book is like good company where you feel you are among new friends (see the Wind in the Willows, above) and sometimes... it’s not. We are used to frankly horrible characters in fiction - Humbert Humbert in Lolita, the guy in Dostoyevsky who murders his landlady with an axe, any number of murderers, liars, creeps - these are mostly written by men, and they often get their comeuppance or at least have their regrets. But I am not a moralist. I am not a male writer. I don’t know any murderers (I do know a few creeps). The women I know are not saints, though some of them come close. Mostly, as a writer, I am interested in people who are flawed. Also I am looking at a span of 25 years. Someone said to me recently ‘But Rosaleen really loved Pat Madigan, as though that was the most important thing. Well she loved him in 1956, she loved him in 1962, but 1985 was probably a different matter. And we have little enough evidence that he ever loved her back, btw - it is just not the way he thinks. I don’t do solutions. I do lives.

@Twitterqueen

I found the book different but not engaging and can't say I got any real pleasure from it. As Scamp says above, it felt a bit like a text that you have to read and digest for an exercise, rather than something to immerse yourself into with a bar of chocolate and a glass of wine.

A deliberate distance from all the characters is maintained throughout the book, which meant I couldn’t engage or sympathise with them. Dan’s New York life for example, is assembled by statements from other, peripheral characters so I never got to feel any of the uncertainty, fear, self-loathing, indecision he must have felt in coming to terms with being a gay man. The feelings of others are described, the NY gay scene, the whole AIDS panic and fear – these are all drawn well, but Dan himself is cold and unknown.

We get closer to him at the end, when he’s back in the family home but for me, it was too late at that point – I wanted to know him from the beginning, when he thought he wanted to be a priest and when he married.

I felt the same about Emmet. His interactions with Alice don’t reveal much of his character at all and I found this irritating. A man in his job must surely feel huge compassion for the suffering of others and for mankind in general, but he never exhibits this through thought or word. We learn that others view him as a cold fish too – as he does himself, recognising his own inability to love.

There’s almost a feeling of dislike, of nastiness towards the characters that made it impossible for me to like them too, though I wanted to. Hanna’s alcoholism is almost treated as a generic, middle-class female problem, rather than one that is personal to her and her husband.
Constance was the only character who had real substance for me. We are allowed to get inside her head and to understand her life, feel her joy and sympathise with her cancer scare.

The love that is in the book is not happy or joyful (aside from Constance’s love for her children). Love is a weight, a tie, and is full of resentment, disappointments and unmet expectations.

So while I accept this a clever book, with vibrant imagery and interesting use of language, I don’t love it.

We have sadly run out of time, and I feel there is so much I'd still like to ask...I think Anne managed to answer everyone but apologies if we didn't get to your question in time.

Thank you all for a fascinating and extremely lively discussion, its been a treat.

Anne, thank you very very much indeed for fitting this into a manically busy week, and for all your illuminating and insightful answers. You've been an excellent guest. We'll be cheering for you next week when the Baileys Prize winner is announced and keeping fingers crossed. I cannot wait to read what comes next, your books are consistently wonderful.

Many thanks again and do come back one day...

Thank you to Anne, Tillymumsnet and everyone on this webchat. I have really enjoyed it.