![]() ![]() Each chapter is narrated by a different child, with a large section toward the end written from the point of view of Rosaleen, the mother. Here we have four children and two parents. ![]() The Green Road too is about an Irish family, but lacks the claustrophobia of The Gathering. She has her own memories of the abuse Liam was subjected to, and there seems no escape in this book, either in Veronica’s life or that of her mother and grandmother from the eternal woundings of sex. Veronica, who as an adult is charged with bringing her brother Liam’s body back to Ireland, is one of twelve living children after seven miscarriages to her mother, the ‘Mammy’ who must never be upset. This dark and terrible book is about wrongs done to children and about the damage that happens in families and is never acknowledged. We children now exposed to Charlie’s bald head, naked in death.Īnd that is the least the children have been exposed to. Ada the housewife, with a terrible spot on her blind. When she reached the window, she raised one hand and pressed the blind flat. ![]() Then, of a sudden, she seemed to realise that this was her own bedroom with her own husband in it, dead or not, and she simply walked round the bed. Her rage at this, and at the flippant behaviour of the fly, spell out the hopelessness of the situation. In Anne Enright’s Booker Prize winning novel of 2007, The Gathering, as the family stand round the corpse of the recently deceased grandfather, Charlie, the grandmother Ada spots a fly, ‘crawling on the side of his neck.’ ![]()
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