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nature of chance and choice, love and loss, and to learn the difference between the ‘passionate and cold’ (177) that his late father has told him a sniper should combine. Try as he will to place himself at a remove from his acts, even to the extent of dealing with them in part by means of a quaint vocabulary garnered under his father’s tuition from the works of Shakespeare, he proved more susceptible and more various than he knew. The unobtrusive but ceaseless play of the novel’s difficult cross-currents of internal and external worlds, love and death, human and animal, action and repose, to which the narrator’s distinctive tone shows him withstanding and surrendering, and making Julius Winsome a telling parable on the nature of the human and how its energies continually question us as to how best we might live. Supplementary Reading Review by Simon Willis, The Literary Review (June 2007), p. 5 Oliver Harris, ‘Death of Hobbes’, The Times Literary Supplement, 8 June 2007 Also Published in 2006 Roddy Doyle, Paula Spencer; Claire Kilroy, Tenderwire; Patrick McCabe, Winterwood; Colum McCann, Zoli; Edna O’Brien, The Light of Evening; Keith Ridgway, Animals 2007 Anne Enright, The Gathering Dublin-born Enright is the author of four novels. Three focus on family themes, and include The Wig My Father Wore (1995) and What Are You Like? (2000), while The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) imaginatively reconstructs the career of a nineteenth-century adventuress – something of a Lola Montez – who became First Lady of Paraguay. Enright (b. 1962) has also published two noted collections of short fiction and a non-fiction work on motherhood. ‘A hosting of the Hegartys. God help us all’ (187). That is the gathering that the narrative heads towards. With their faded mother, nine Hegarty siblings, including the narrator, Veronica, come together back home in Dublin – though with no marked expression of togetherness or unity – for the wake and funeral of another family member, Liam, an alcoholic who has drowned himself in England. Liam’s death is not only an occasion for the various rituals intended to impart safe conduct to a passing. It also prompts Veronica’s 2007: ANNE ENRIGHT, THE GATHERING 169 complicated narrative, which weaves together, in a style that combines unsparing directness with felicitous insight, family history, family failings , motherhood, and her thoughts about her own married life with Tom and their two young daughters. Mixing memory and imagination, desire and loss, the non-linear storyline produces a prismatic view of three generations of emotional history. In doing so, it asks wideranging and discomforting questions about sexuality, belief, individual frailty and the lives of women. It is not merely the facts of the case that make up the narrative but their inner consequences, and it is in the latter context that facts are disabused of their time-bound, empirical character and converted into presentiments, hauntings, fears, resistances and needs through which the ineffaceable particularity of individual experience is registered. This sense of the half-life of facts, their persistent aftermath and irrecoverable actuality, gives The Gathering its acute consciousness of incompleteness and limitation, of the disheartened spirit and the fallible flesh – and of the apparent interchangeability of those two epithets in relation to those two nouns. The narrative’s impetus is announced at the outset: ‘I need to bear witness to an uncertain event’ (1). And this interplay between feeling and knowing, between personal need and others’ behaviour, permeates the novel and all the characters in it. The central occurrence of which Veronica is convinced – even if her recollection of it as a matter of fact is unclear – is that when she, Liam and their sister Kitty were sent to live with their grandmother, Ada, Liam was molested by the oppressive Lamb Nugent, a friend of Ada’s husband, Charlie Spillane. Charlie is something of a luftmensch, improvident and wayward but, where Ada is concerned, utterly devoted and loving, for which much else can be forgiven him in Veronica’s eyes. But while Charlie is away, Lamb Nugent preys on Ada, seeking from her what his own marriage cannot provide, and inclined to avenge himself on the couple. (Much later, Veronica discovers that Nugent has been her grandparents’ meanspirited and vexatious landlord.) Despite, or in addition to, Veronica’s belief in what she saw Liam undergo, it is also possible that her sensitivity to the emotional atmosphere of her grandparents’ home created an image of such an act as an...

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