The Green Road
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By Anne Enright
avg rating
2 reviews
Shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Novel Award
Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize
A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion – a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.
The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
Anne Enright is addicted to the truth of things. Sentence by sentence, there are few writers alive who can invest the language with such torque and gleam, such wit and longing – who can write dialogue that speaks itself aloud, who can show us the million splinters of her characters’ lives then pull them back up together again, into a perfect glass.
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Floating amongst the emotionally strained Madigan family, particularly around Hannah, Enright has evoked a time and a place which sends shivers up and down your spine. Then she suddenly plunges us eleven years on with Dan in scared Aids-frightened New York: a totally different place and atmosphere. As a reader, I am caught. (Review by MJ)
Most of Part One I enjoyed and found the characterization convincing and the development of the various family members' personalities interesting. (Review by EJ on first half of the book)
I happily admit that I started this book with some trepidation as I had only read one other book by Anne Enright before (The Gathering) which I didn't enjoy at all. However I was very pleasantly surprised by this. I found myself drawn in, not by the major players in this book, but by its supporting characters. Billy in Dans story, the little dog and and Alice in Emmets story, these were the characters which spoke to me and moved me.
Because of this I preferred part one of the book to part two. Rosaleen and her children did not gain my sympathies so easily although I did enjoy the family interactions and the tensions between them all.
