Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren on what makes the Irish tick
This is a novel grounded in Ireland — poor Ireland, proud Ireland, and changing Ireland. It’s particulars involve female longings and female bickering and female contrariness, none of which is meant to be judgmental. It’s all explainable in the cultural mores of the day, those being largely shaped by the Catholic church.
The novel is plotted as three coming of age stories from three generations of the same family: those of a daughter, her mother, and her mother’s father. All three are bound by an enduring affection, though those feelings survive more physical separation than togetherness.
Ninety percent of the book interweaves the stories of the mother and daughter, each from their particular problematic conceptions and childhoods to their tense lives as adults. The novel follows them not continuously, but episodically, relating the periods most formative of the kind of adults they become.
The author, Anne Enright, who won the Booker Prize for the novel, got the prize likely because the book is larger in its themes than detailing personal development and troubled relationships. It’s a prism through which she portrays the modern history of Ireland from a rural, fairy-believing culture to an urban, techno culture–something that happened in a three generational shift in the novel, but longer in its actual history.
The father and grandfather of the novel has only a single chapter devoted to his own coming of age, but details of his adult life are referenced in the stories of his daughter and granddaughter. He has become a well regarded poet, but a man who abandoned his wife and children for a life in America. His one chapter tells of the change he underwent from an 11 year old altar boy bent toward the priesthood by the local country priest. This priest knew the boy had a sensitive intelligence and encouraged him through book reading and writing to prepare himself for the seminary. In doing this, he inadvertently nudged the boy away from his church leanings and caused him to realize his truer calling as a poet.
One of the critical events in the boy’s transformation was participating in a shaming of a young girl he had previously believed he loved. This ‘betrayal’ of sorts coincided with his change in vocation. Enright isn’t explicit about the forces or revelations that motivated the change, because as a poet herself, she leaves those discoveries to the reader. But seeing, rightly or wrongly, the cultural climate of Ireland as the scaffolding to explain the characters’ progress and stumbles, the boy’s betrayal of his erstwhile girlfriend also indicts the church for the betrayal of its own mission. The lessons of the church and the cultural practices it dictated were more about inflicting cruelty than meting out compassion. Poetry, the boy realized, was a surer path to understanding his better self than was the priesthood. It wasn’t a path, though, without its washouts. We hear of these through his daughter and granddaughter.
Enright details the lives of her characters and Ireland as a whole as an acceptance and ultimate appreciation of change and individuality. The immediate consequences weren’t necessarily pretty, but it was always the case that stasis was the worse alternative.
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