I don’t even know what name to put on it. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. It opens with a declaration that is almost like a witness statement: The Gathering is a gathering of family members around one of their dead, but it is also a gathering of facts, of evidence. She knows from the start when things began to go wrong for her brother. In doing so, she has to open doors into dark rooms and turn up messy, uncomfortable facts. She re-creates and, where necessary, imagines the events that went towards making his life the life it was. The shock of Liam’s death leads Veronica to suspend her own life and go back over his to keep him company in his coffin.

We find out – later – that he had stones in his pockets, that he was wearing a fluorescent coat so that his body could be easily found, and that he was wearing no socks and no pants. The novel opens with Veronica learning that Liam has committed suicide. She is Veronica, the dead Liam’s (slightly) younger sister, who lives a comfortable middle-class existence, and is trying to work out where she fits in with all this – with their combined past, and Liam’s death. The narrator is someone new too part of the new Ireland.

There is nothing clichéd about the language (Enright treasures words she polishes them, puts them on display). It is centred on a wake for a man who has died early: an alcoholic who was betrayed as a child, part of a large, chaotic family.

It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it.

The gathering enright novel