The Green Road

At the gate beyond the last house, where the tarmac road turned into a green road and the sheepdog turned for home, she looked back on the valley of Oughtdarra. Solemn and dark now, with the Flaggy Shore at the sea edge of it, graves and dolmens were there, and ancient roads and gateways to nothing, from nothing. A couple of houses were lit up for Christmas, the blink of the lights a glimmering from this distance. There was a little ruined church down in that place, with a curse in the name of the man who built it too terrible to speak aloud. This she knew from Pat Madigan who took her walking along these uplands with her little dog in the late summer of 1956.

At the beginning of The Green Road – entitled Leaving – we meet the Madigans: a family with four kids in Co. Clare, Ireland. It is 1980, and when the oldest son, Dan, announces that he intends to join the priesthood, his mother, Rosaleen, takes to her bed with grief. We are informed that this isn't the first time that she employed “the horizontal solution”, but it was the longest, and this section is seen through the naive eyes of the youngest child, Hanna. Time skips ahead and we meet up with Dan in 1991 NYC: he is now an uncloseting gay man, falling for other men right at the height of the AIDS crisis. Skip to 1997 in Limerick and Constance (the eldest Madigan child) is having a mammogram to rule out cancer after finding a lump in her breast. Skip again to 2002 and Emmett is an aid worker in Mali, living with a woman but unable to commit. In 2005, as Rosaleen is writing her annual Christmas cards to her children, she is seized by an impulse to sell the family house and she uses the cards to call her children home for one last Christmas. Each of these sections could stand alone as complete works, and curiously for a family-based story, each of these characters spend little or no time thinking about the others.

In Part Two – entitled Coming Home – the reader is brought up-to-date with the various characters (Dan becomes engaged to a Toronto lawyer, Hanna is an alcoholic actress, Emmett is temporarily living in Dublin with a Dutch aid worker, Constance is a happy and wealthy housewife), and although none of them particularly like their mother, they are helpless to resist her invitation. They all know, too, that their boyfriends/girlfriend/baby are not exactly welcome at the family home, and other than Constance (whose family lives nearby and knows how to deal with Gran), the middle-aged siblings return to the old house expecting to be treated as children. The discomfort begins immediately, with everyone resuming their childhood roles (down to sitting at their accustomed places at the dining table), and ruling over it all is the passive-aggressive Rosaleen; equal parts offensive and self-pitying.

'Whatever I did – whatever it was – it was not enough. Clearly. That's all. I just don't know.' The tears spilled over now. Rosaleen was a little girl. Rosaleen was a sad old woman. Their own mother. In a moment she would leave and go up to bed and Oh, they loved her now, they were hopeless in it. They yearned to make her happy.

I've included a lot of plot because the plot doesn't really matter –The Green Road is a book about people and relationships, and ultimately, how unknowable people are to one another. If the beginning section is meant to set up mysteries – Why didn't Dan become a priest? What caused Emmett's hinted-at breakdown? Why is Rosaleen so unaffectionate? – the answers to these questions never come out. Instead, we learn just enough about who everyone is, without benefitting from the usual novelist's trick of explaining how they got this way, and when they're all finally sat down together for Christmas dinner, people are talking in non sequiturs, being non-responsive to one another, speaking in family code, acting out old resentments, and the whole thing is a giant, realistic, unresolved mess. 

I think the ultimate point of The Green Road comes down to one offhand comment from this dinner. After Rosaleen and her children agree that it's a “very hard thing” to describe one's own mother, Hanna remarks: It's like there's some secret. But there just isn't. In trying to depict this rather ordinary family, it's like author Anne Enright is saying, “There's no secret to it; people – whether mothers, fathers, or children – just are”. 

And so this made for a strange reading experience for me. On nearly every page, I found delightful observations and turns of phrase; I have always been a sucker for an Irish storyteller, and as this story is set in the only area of Ireland that I've visited, I was definitely engaged. In the beginning section, as we journeyed through time and space, I was hooked by the diverse experiences of the Madigan clan and was looking forward to how Enright would pull them all together. But in the second section, where it seems clear that the plot was meant to be a depiction of real life instead of a parable for a deeper theme – even if that's genius and truthful and perhaps even radical – this simply let me down. I don't even understand why Rosaleen took to her bed when Dan announced he wanted to become a priest; I wanted some answers, and even in real life, one is able to find someone who'll spill the beans on a family story (and doesn't that undermine the realism?).

So maybe this book went over my head (I do remember loving The Gathering, so I'm not putting the blame on Enright), and I did like so many small parts of the book (I especially enjoyed the star-crossed love story between Rosaleen and Pat and could totally identify with Constance), but I would give The Green Road 3.5 stars if I could and am rounding down to place it lower against the other books on the longlist of this year's Man Booker Prize nominees.

Man Booker Longlist 2015:

Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family

Anne Enright  - The Green Road 

Marlon James  - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Laila Lalami  - The Moor's Account 

Tom McCarthy  - Satin Island 

Chigozie Obioma  - The Fishermen 

Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations 

Marilynne Robinso - Lila 

Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter

Sunjeev Sahota  - The Year of the Runaways 

Anna Smaill - The Chimes 

Anne Tyler  - A Spool of Blue Thread 

Hanya Yanagihara  - A Little Life 

I was really pleased that A Brief History of Seven Killings took the prize; even more pleased that it didn't go to A Little Life as seemed inevitable.

*****

I am delighted that The Glorious Heresies won the Bailey's Prize: the best of an uneven but respectable shortlist; here in my ranking order.

The 2016 Bailey's Prize shortlist:

Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies
Anne Enright: The Green Road
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen
Cynthia Bond: Ruby
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life