The Gathering, Anne Enright, Jonathan Cape, price not stated.

Finishing The Gathering fails to throw up any conclusive answers. Enright’s saga, in which the narrator, Veronica Hegarty traces the history of her dysfunctional Irish family after her brother Liam commits suicide, is a extremely bleak exploration of conflict and heartache. To merely describe it as a novel of the interior would be to fail to explain how strenuously it plumbs the suffocating recesses of the narrator’s mind, mining her memory (“while the loud world passes by”) for minute details, quiet moments, and tiny illumined truths. (“All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden conviction that uncertainty spawns.”)

The Booker judges were probably swayed less by the roar of the plot than the quiet and unruffled flow of the prose, which breaks out every now and then in passages of extraordinary beauty. Enright has a rare ability to convey great emotional turmoil in a calm and measured style and her effort at freshness is rarely, if ever, guilty of calling attention to itself. The surprises in her prose are small but impossible to miss — an unexpected conjunction of words, a lovely digression in the narrative, a sudden pause to recall a fleeting memory.

“This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family — a whole fucking country — drowning in shame,” reflects Veronica at one point. This suggests there is a wider resonance to the family saga, but it is hard to see where this lies. It is possible that Enright, in tracing three generations, is also attempting to trace changing attitudes to things such as sex (which the family seems fixated about), love and commitment. But this is not always evident in this work of great insularity, of a world that rarely extends beyond her family. “I stay downstairs while the family breathes above me and I write it down, I lay them out in nice sentences, all my clean, white bones.”

The novel begins with the news of Liam’s suicide and ends when the family gathers for the wake and funeral. The death provokes Veronica to revive long-forgotten memories, grapple with old ghosts, and imagine what might have happened or what might have been. The death of her alcoholic brother (Liam drowns himself in a tide of “blood, sea-water and whiskey”) is related to a traumatic experience in his childhood. And it is not just Liam, but the other siblings too who have been shaped by family history, particularly by their grandmother’s Ada’s decision to marry their grandfather Charlie Spillane instead of his friend Lamb Nungent.

Enright jokingly described the novel as “the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie”, but weepie it is not. It is, by turns, grim, comic, joyless and peculiarly hopeful — sentimental it is not.