Verbal Magazine

Boom or Bust…

When you win the Booker Prize, everyone wants a piece of you. Stepping out of the rain, into a quiet hotel foyer off Leicester Square, Anne Enright places her itinerary in front of me. Busy schedule?
‘Reading at Foyles last night. Then a quick reading on BBC at noon, more signings, and another interview, I think,’ she replies.

Some writers struggle with the whole PR world of publishing, interviews and public press calls. Others seem to take it in their stride. Enright seems to be in the latter category.

The media circus Enright is currently on is to promote, The Forgotten Waltz, her first novel since, The Gathering, in 2007, which catapulted her from a poor - albeit respected Irish writer - to an international literary superstar, with a little bit of help from that famous literary prize.

If The Gathering was all about the misery and shameful secretive nature of Irish society (a novel that takes place around a funeral and a historical case of sexual abuse) then The Forgotten Waltz is a book that is: forward, frank, and explicit in its desires and material wants. While the characters in The Gathering drink bottles of vodka on the sly to help them sleep at night, the choice of drink in The Forgotten Waltz is fine wine, at garden parties, where the price of apartments in Bulgaria is the topic of conversation. Was it more fun this time around, writing a novel that had less tragedy than its predecessor?
‘Whatever you do people comment on it. Everyone said The Gathering was very bleak, and then you say, well Sophocles is bleak. So then you write a book that isn’t so bleak and people say, where’s your bleak gone?! I had more fun and enjoyment writing The Forgotten Waltz, there is more mischief in it. It would be hard to write a book that was sadder than The Gathering. A lot of The Forgotten Waltz is about denial, and denial is a key word in what happened in Ireland in the last ten years.”
The Forgotten Waltz is the story of an affair between Gina Moynihan, and her lover Sean valley, two married, respectable middle class Dublin suburbanites.
Using the economic stats of the Celtic Tiger Ireland as a sort of moral compass to the affair, Enright weaves the highs and lows of the relationship, as interest rates rise and fall, the climax culminating in 2009- when the economy is collapsing- and the affair for the reader goes beyond voyeuristic observation, becoming instead: a moralistic question about the nature of adultery, and the consequences it can bring upon a family.

Enright’s main protagonist, Gina, seems like a woman who has watched too many episodes of Sex and the City, very egocentric, and hard to empathise with at times. Was it her attention to develop such a hardened, ice queen character?

‘Gina gets different responses from different people, and that’s partially the way I like it. What I wanted to do was to give this book a kind of moral poise: you sympathised with what Gina felt, but not necessarily with what she did. She is egotistical because she’s in love, and that is a highly egotistical place to be, and love is blind, so she doesn’t see what she is doing, by the end of the book she does see what she is doing and has a move towards empathy and becomes a bigger person I think. Also, it’s a shame free book. Gina knows what she wants and she’s not ashamed of it. The Gathering is full of shame, Veronica in that book actually says,” the whole country is drowning in shame”.

Although Enright’s books are all about social realism, and she repeatedly talks about Irish society in the course of this interview, she is very reluctant to claim that her books actually reflect the society we live in.
‘One of the things I like about Irish writers is that they don’t make large claims for owning the world. And certainly as a woman writer I feel similarly. Whatever it is, I don’t own it. I’m not at the centre of power. Does the novel talk about society, I don’t know if I’m gone on that argument.’

The hallmark of Enright’s style of prose is in the strong voice she narrates in- which is candid, frank and brutally honest, particularly from a female perspective.
If one were to look at Enright’s last two novels as a progression of the Irish woman, you might say, The Gathering, projects the Irish woman who lacks confidence and still feels unequally placed in her surroundings, where as in The Forgotten Waltz, the women characters seem to be running rings around their male counterparts.
Due to the very conservative nature of Irish society, the road to equality for women wasn’t as straightforward in Ireland as it was in other countries, says Enright.

‘Feminism didn’t happen in Ireland the same way as it did it Britain or America.
As recently as the 1980s, Irish women were fighting for the right to contraception; we’re talking very basic stuff. They were fighting for the reproductive control of themselves, and then in the Celtic Tiger, they borrowed a lot of the financial feminism from Britain and America. This is a funny thing for me to say, but I feel Irish women have always had a more relaxed relationship with men than I see in say, Manhattan or London. When I wrote, Making Babies, other books had been written by women about the same thing, and they felt, very keenly, the loss of status when they became mothers. In Ireland, we still have this residual respect for mothers, so as a woman, you don’t feel the loss of status so keenly, when you have children. The Mammy has a lot of power in Ireland.’

At the end of The Forgotten Waltz, when the boom comes crashing down- an era that will continue to haunt Irish history forever- the final scene takes place in a car journey through Dublin, where the narrator tells us: “the snow will melt and the houses will sell, one house or the other”.

In typical Enright fashion, the novel doesn’t finish with a happy ending. Separating fiction from reality however, Enright says that there is a lot to be hopeful for.

‘People are saying Ireland has changed, actually, Ireland is still a very family based culture. It’s interesting now, that happiness ratings are still very high for people, even though the boom is over. People talked about the boom a lot, and it was also hard to believe, it was like they were talking it into existence, that is what a bubble is, and that’s what the emotion was, so as a writer you’d be very wary of that, but also very interested in it at the same time.’

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