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Anne Enright: what if King Lear had been a mother?
In her latest novel, Booker Prize winner Anne Enright 're-genders’ Shakespeare. She explains why to Gaby Wood
'If Kakfa was a woman, what would she write?” asks Anne Enright. “And more radically, if Kafka had children – I mean, if these children came out of Kafka, and then turned around and looked at him, what would that do to his work?”
We are sitting in a café in London, talking about motherhood and writing. Enright – whose sixth novel has just been published and whose only work of non-fiction is partly about the disconsolations of maternity – has lodged a genial complaint. Male authors are not asked whether they have found it difficult to combine their work with fatherhood, she grumbles. Then she wonders aloud about Kafka.
You can’t have it both ways, I say; you can’t claim it makes no difference because the genders are equal and then ask what difference it would make if the genders were reversed. “But I’m interested in all these dissociated writers, disconnected writers,” she says. “All the mean, cold, bad boys. Sad, impressive boys. The utter physical connection of having children, early on – you can’t be unconnected after that. You can be mad, you can be all kinds of things, but there is a very strong rewiring that happens, that is about connection.”
Many years ago, Enright was taught by Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia – though “taught” may be stretching it. “Oh, she didn’t teach me a thing,” Enright says with a laugh, but Carter was the reason she went, and one thing she encouraged her students to do was “re-gender” stories and see what happened. Ever since, Enright has had in mind the idea of King Lear as a woman. Specifically, King Lear as a mother. Enter Rosaleen, the half-heroine of her new book, The Green Road.
Though she is an influential champion of fiction far harder to digest than her own, Enright is not a literary snob, and has – unlike those “mean, cold, bad boys” – the explicit intention of pleasing the reader. “Telling a story: what’s wrong with that?” she asks rhetorically.
But she is much stranger than she seems – more formally inventive, more linguistically skilled, her viewpoint always wiser, funnier and more tart than you could ever script. She’s not flamboyantly unpredictable, just discreetly, empathetically off-balance. “I don’t mind people looking up from the page and having a little think,” she says drily, her voice marginally over-accented for comic effect.
Enright is, above all else, a great novelist of uncertainty. This is reflected, too, in her patterns of speech, which cascade into qualification. “I had intended always, possibly, sometime…,” she’ll say, and you’ll barely notice that the sentence crumbles in the middle, because this is, in itself, a form of precision.
“I wanted mixed feelings from the reader,” she explained of her last book, The Forgotten Waltz, “not a sense of beautiful clarity, because although beautiful clarity may be what we seek in books, mixed feelings are what we actually have about people in real life.”
Some readers mistook that novel for a smaller and more ordinary offering – after the daring trauma of The Gathering, which won the Man Booker Prize – but I felt she was making categorisations such as “slight” or “ambitious” more irrelevant with each publication. Because whatever the subject, whatever the form, to be accompanied through a book by a mind such as Enright’s is an experience that’s very hard to let go of at the end.
The Green Road is, even in Enright’s estimation, difficult to describe, because so much happens, between the cracks of the story she tells. The first half follows, in slim slices of time, four siblings who have spread to different parts of the world – or stayed in Ireland. (“I put as much effort into my housewives as I do into people in more exotic locations,” Enright says.) The second half finds them all together one Christmas, part-strangers to each other, spurred by an announcement from their “fond and foolish” – that is, furious – mother: “I have decided to sell the house.”
“I realised that you could do Lear without any of the plot,” Enright reflects, mischievously. “You’re just keeping the emotions. Rosaleen doesn’t have to sell the house. She just has to say it. They don’t have to do anything for her to say: 'monstrous ingratitude’. They just have to sit there.”
Though you might imagine that borrowing from King Lear meant pilfering its basic premise or structure, Enright’s view of the play is altogether different. “One of the things I love about it is that the emotional arc of Lear’s journey separates completely from the machinations of plot,” she explains. “The plot becomes more frantic and machine-like and clickety-clack – letters and conspiracies – while Lear is wandering with flowers in his hair, and that to me is incredibly moving.”
She didn’t want to labour the references, but she has sprinkled The Green Road with clues. On the very first page she describes a scarecrow-like branch sticking up out of an oil drum as “a bare fork” – a nod to Lear’s speech about man being “no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal”. “I don’t know if it’s good or just silly,” Enright suggests. “Not everyone will get all the jokes. But it pleases me.”
In practice, the intellectual exercise lies far beneath the surface. One of Enright’s great strengths is the ability to build layered and powerful family dramas out of the ambivalence of individuals, and The Green Road is a triumph of human complication.
“I used to write these very fragmented, fractured texts, and clearly wanted to be a modernist and wasn’t managing it,” Enright jokes. “But I had this terrible thing, that I wished I could write a proper book.”
What would a “proper book” be? I ask. “This is very much more like a proper book,” she admits. And then, an inevitable qualification. “But it contains all the improper books I’ve written.”
Anne Enright will be speaking at Hay on May 26. To buy The Green Road (Cape) for £15 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844 8711514