This is why we bother

At one point in Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz she has her characters wandering around the small roads of Limerick and Clare in a car, finding a way to talk to one another and when you are reading the book in one sitting on a Sunday morning this moment comes as a bit of a relief. Everything in her book is so pitch perfect that the lapse into basic Irish pastoral ("if only we lived in the beautiful West we could get it together") makes the performance less intimidating. And then you look at where they are actually driving and it is on the small roads that you used to have to take to get to Shannon Airport, and of course these are historically significant roads. Elizabeth Bowen has her character Jane in A World of Love drive along those roads to collect Richard Priam off the flight from America. Emma Winer made me see how important that excursion was for Bowen, it literally got her out of the Big House. Emma hasn't been the only person to make a lot of those back roads either. Roy Foster reads the whole novel as a final critique of the kind of society Bowen suffered in the Ireland of the 1950s and the journey as into a kind of nothingness. He places the incident into the context of what he argues was the failed effort of Bowen and her colleagues at The Bell to reconcile Anglo-Irish culture to the new state and society. Others, like Brian Corcoran, read it as a much more interesting opening to new possibilities on her part. So the roads have a literary intertext and speak to a contemporary political resonance. So much for a lapse.

I have no idea if Anne Enright had this set of references consciously in mind as she was writing and it really wouldn't matter anyway if she didn't. The basic architecture of the book is so secure that in some ways she may get those kinds of references as a kind of unconscious free gift. She makes it so easy to see the basic reference points for understanding Gina Moynihan, like Bovary or Gretta from "The Dead", that  the reviews I've read so far miss what seems to me to be the real ambition of the book to explore the modernisation of Ireland, from the fifties to the crash, through Gina. Gina is one of the many angels of history that see the debris piling up behind them. There is a lot to debate in some of the ideas that could be extracted from the book, but to be honest that seems pointless to me. What this book does is start to allow us to imagine the experience of my generation as a whole and to locate it in the sweep of our history. You can only know what you have first imagined.

It is a fierce book. The last line condemns a whole generation. But despite that it is also written from inside and with emotion rather than outside with anger. Only one real flaw. Imagine how much more depth and complexity it would have it set in Cork.