It’s December and the Madigan offspring are getting ready to return for a family Christmas. All have long left their childhood home but, once back together, it’s not long before the old arguments, resentments and dysfunctions swiftly reappear.
“I’m sorry I can’t invite you for Christmas dinner. I’m Irish and my family is mad,” Emmet tells his housemate in Dublin before leaving for the homestead in the remote west of Ireland. Indeed.
Enright begins The Green Road in 1980, in rural County Clare, where embers of the Irish Civil War from 1922 to 1923 apparently continue to smoulder.
Hanna, 12, wanders the town to pick up some ointment for her grandmother but instead learns how her family was divided by the war: “Grandfather Madigan was shot during the civil war and their grandfather Considine refused to help. The men ran to the medical hall looking for ointment and bandages and he just pulled down the blind.”
The chapters then move to narrate the stories of other members of the family: Dan, a would-be priest who lives an alternative life in New York – his social milieu in the grip of the Aids epidemic; Constance, who has married a property developer and returned to live locally but suffers a cancer scare; and Emmet, a man difficult to pin down who has worked in Africa. The scene is set then, for a few days in December, with members of the damaged family enduring their own private hell as the matriarch, Rosaleen, has decided she will sell the house.
Enright's books are particularly good at allowing a reader to make up their own mind about a character's thoughts or actions. Her Man Booker prize-winning novel from 2007, The Gathering was about another dysfunctional family, while The Forgotten Waltz was the story of a messy affair set against the backdrop of the recent economic crash in Ireland. This financial collapse led to a new exodus of migrants.
While Dan returns earlier in 2005, it’s hard not to appreciate his experiences of emigration in this context. “He might get stuck in Ireland, somehow, he would get trapped in 1983 with a white sliced pan on the table and the Eurovision song contest on TV.” Constance has picked him up from Shannon Airport, a traditional point of departure for emigrants and it’s a bittersweet feeling to return. Dan decided he wanted to be a priest, supposedly after the visit of the pope to Ireland in 1979. But the pontiff’s visit that Enright describes is not exactly for the devout. Emmet, the younger brother, attends and is more concerned with having a good time, camping out and learning how to smoke. How Dan makes the decision to join is unclear, but mission work is far away. As Hanna puts it: “There were no flights home from the missions. Dan would leave Ireland forever. And besides, he might die.”
But even when he does return, for Christmas, Dan is not overjoyed and expresses the feelings many emigrants have come to know only too well, always in a no-man’s-land, never away but never truly home either: “He opened his eyes to see tail lights, the cream and grey upholstery of his sister’s car, the beginnings of rain on the windscreen. Ireland. Great.”
The almost inevitable crisis peaks at the end of the novel, with their mother in some sort of breakdown, chastising her children for being ungrateful, and all of them calling her by a different name: Mammy, Mam or Rosaleen: “The comedy of it was not lost on them, the fact that each of her children was calling out to a different woman. They did not know who she was.”
There is no easy conclusion for the Madigans. No one truly finds what they were looking for, even if they knew what they were looking for in the first place, and no one emerges in better shape. Enright has delivered a fine work about how you can’t escape the past.
This book is available on Amazon.
John Dennehy is the deputy editor of The Review.
