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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Enright takes us into the heart of a family and charts the impact of a difficult parent on the development of siblings. No-one is particularly likeable but I was able to empathise with all of the characters as the consequences of their childhood played out in their adult lives. Enright is a precise observer of damaged people as she analyses clinically the s.ources of that damage, all the while describing lyrically a wild and beautiful place
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The Green Road is about the Irish Madigan family, from the eighties until now. They are a regular family, each playing the role expected of them, wishing to be understood, not seeking to understand. There is no great plot, but time spent in New York, Mali, Dublin and a small town in County Clare. No characters are truly likeable, and there is no significant resolution, but an interesting look at the selfishness, messiness, intractability, and strength of family ties, and the struggles of modern life.
A nice, slightly loosely structured story of one Irish family. Enright shortly describes a shared childhood, and then goes on to give you a view of the four children and their mother's lives some thirty years onwards. Thirty years is a big gap, and Enright is not interested in explaining why the characters ended up where they did. That is mostly fine, but Enright sometimes identifies the characters by certain traits, especially Hanna (the washed-up actress and alcoholic) and Emmet (the disillusioned, unable-to-love, Third-World doctor). I think her purpose was to write a fragmentary novel that does not give the reader too much background information, but sometimes you just need to make some connections to make the characters turn into persons, especially when they are main characters.
2024 favourites in no particular order
#1 Anne Enright - ‘The Green Road’ (2015)
A splintered family comes home from near and far for Christmas. I found each member endearing for very different reasons; any irritation I felt in moments was the kind one feels for people one actually cares about. Enright has the great quality of inspiring sympathy for her creations while holding them to account. A chapter set during New York’s AIDS crisis was heart-twisting. Irish Laureate.
4.5 stars
#1 Anne Enright - ‘The Green Road’ (2015)
A splintered family comes home from near and far for Christmas. I found each member endearing for very different reasons; any irritation I felt in moments was the kind one feels for people one actually cares about. Enright has the great quality of inspiring sympathy for her creations while holding them to account. A chapter set during New York’s AIDS crisis was heart-twisting. Irish Laureate.
4.5 stars
A perfect novel with imperfect characters that spans decades and continents. Dublin author and Booker prize winner Anne Enright [The Gathering] writes beautifully constructing plausible and faulty characters, of which one wants to read more, know more and become attached. The Green Road is where the family matriarch Rosaleen Madigan enjoys taking long walks. Rosaleen is strong-willed, unyielding and resilient particularly after becoming a widow. In Ardeevin, County Clare, Rosaleen raises four children—two daughters Hanna and Constance and two sons Dan and Emmet. The children move away from their childhood home and live varied lives throughout the world.
Dan becomes a priest but then moves to New York with a fiancée. He carries on a relationship with the handsome Billy lying to himself that he’s gay only for Billy. Enright writes: “Two nights later, at eleven forty-five p.m., Dan the spoilt priest was outside Billy Walker’s door, looking for sex. Again. And sex is what he got.” During the early 90s he’s in the midst of New York’s gay scene at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Later he finally admits he’s gay and marries a man in Canada. Emmet travels the world to aid the impoverished and fulfill his wanderlust. He never has to commit to any one place or one person for long. He travels to war-torn, medically inefficient countries to work to help improve their living conditions. At one point he’s living with a woman in Africa. His relationships are always tenuous and he cares more for his own happiness and the people he’s helping on his various missives than any long-term coupling. Constance remains close to home to raise a family after somewhat settling in marriage. She once considered moving to America but didn’t get on the plane. “Constance still liked Ireland, the way you could talk to anyone. I would not be the same in America, she thought, and tried to remember why she failed to get on the plane.” Hanna gives up her love of theater and the potential for a career when she gets pregnant. These are flawed, struggling children that Enright describes and develops with compassion.
In 2005, Rosaleen summons her children home for one last Christmas as she’s decided to sell the family home. “She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer.” This brings out the inner child in the four siblings and makes for a messy homecoming. Enright writes: “The truth was that the house they were sitting in was worth a ridiculous amount, and the people sitting in it were worth very little. Four children on the brink of middle-age: They had no money. Dan, especially, had no money, and he could not think why that was, or who might be to blame. But he recognised, in the silence the power Rosaleen had over her children, none of whom had grown up to match her.” No one wants the family house sold. No one wants that disruption. Nobody wants the truth. As Rosaleen thinks: “Such selfish children she had reared.”
review by Amy Steele first appeared at Entertainment Realm
Dan becomes a priest but then moves to New York with a fiancée. He carries on a relationship with the handsome Billy lying to himself that he’s gay only for Billy. Enright writes: “Two nights later, at eleven forty-five p.m., Dan the spoilt priest was outside Billy Walker’s door, looking for sex. Again. And sex is what he got.” During the early 90s he’s in the midst of New York’s gay scene at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Later he finally admits he’s gay and marries a man in Canada. Emmet travels the world to aid the impoverished and fulfill his wanderlust. He never has to commit to any one place or one person for long. He travels to war-torn, medically inefficient countries to work to help improve their living conditions. At one point he’s living with a woman in Africa. His relationships are always tenuous and he cares more for his own happiness and the people he’s helping on his various missives than any long-term coupling. Constance remains close to home to raise a family after somewhat settling in marriage. She once considered moving to America but didn’t get on the plane. “Constance still liked Ireland, the way you could talk to anyone. I would not be the same in America, she thought, and tried to remember why she failed to get on the plane.” Hanna gives up her love of theater and the potential for a career when she gets pregnant. These are flawed, struggling children that Enright describes and develops with compassion.
In 2005, Rosaleen summons her children home for one last Christmas as she’s decided to sell the family home. “She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer.” This brings out the inner child in the four siblings and makes for a messy homecoming. Enright writes: “The truth was that the house they were sitting in was worth a ridiculous amount, and the people sitting in it were worth very little. Four children on the brink of middle-age: They had no money. Dan, especially, had no money, and he could not think why that was, or who might be to blame. But he recognised, in the silence the power Rosaleen had over her children, none of whom had grown up to match her.” No one wants the family house sold. No one wants that disruption. Nobody wants the truth. As Rosaleen thinks: “Such selfish children she had reared.”
review by Amy Steele first appeared at Entertainment Realm
I found the first half of the book fascinating. I loved every one of these characters and enjoyed Enright's exploration of motivations and personalities. The second half didn't meld together as well for me and seemed a little forced. I loved, however, the description of the relationship between Emmett and his mom. I laughed at loud at the description of his birth because I felt exactly the same way when I first met B.
Anne Enright’s The Green Road has been long listed for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. This is the Irish writer’s sixth novel, but only the third one of hers I’ve read.
The first one I read, The Gathering, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize and, perhaps somewhat unfairly, gave her a reputation for writing rather grim literary fiction, particularly as it looked at the outfall of sexual abuse on a family. The second book, The Forgotten Waltz, was slightly more accessible, but it still explored dark territory — that of an extramarital affair as told by the “other woman”.
But this new novel treads totally different territory. It’s not exactly light-hearted but there are elements of black comedy in it, which make it a fun read as opposed to a depressing one.
The Green Road is essentially a forthright family drama following the lives of four siblings — Hanna, Emmet, Dan and Constance — and their needy, domineering mother, Rosaleen, over the course of 25 years. Each character gets their own section, beginning when Hanna, the youngest child, is just 12 years old, and culminates with all of the siblings returning to their childhood home as adults for a Christmas dinner in 2005 at the height of the Celtic Tiger.
The novel highlights the differences between each of the siblings and the ways in which they all grow apart as they get older and pursue their own lives and careers so that they effectively become strangers — and yet as soon as they’re thrown together for a Christmas celebration all the old tensions, resentments and childhood dynamics come to the fore, almost as if they never moved out of the family home.
Enright takes her time fleshing out all of the characters — most of whom we meet as adults— each of whom is grappling with private difficulties: Dan, who once wanted to be a priest, has reinvented himself as an artist in New York but is living a double life during the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s; Emmet, an aid worker in Africa, has rejected the materialism of the modern world but finds it hard to make meaningful connections with women; Constance, raising her own family in Ireland, has a health scare that she keeps to herself; and Hanna, a first-time mother and struggling actor in Dublin, has an ongoing problem with alcohol.
But it is the central character, Rosaleen, that lends the book its gravitas — and humour. This Irish mammy is manipulative, self-absorbed, living “her entire life requiring things of other people and blaming other people” and vacillating between “a state of hope or regret”.
To read my review in full, please visit my blog.
The first one I read, The Gathering, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize and, perhaps somewhat unfairly, gave her a reputation for writing rather grim literary fiction, particularly as it looked at the outfall of sexual abuse on a family. The second book, The Forgotten Waltz, was slightly more accessible, but it still explored dark territory — that of an extramarital affair as told by the “other woman”.
But this new novel treads totally different territory. It’s not exactly light-hearted but there are elements of black comedy in it, which make it a fun read as opposed to a depressing one.
The Green Road is essentially a forthright family drama following the lives of four siblings — Hanna, Emmet, Dan and Constance — and their needy, domineering mother, Rosaleen, over the course of 25 years. Each character gets their own section, beginning when Hanna, the youngest child, is just 12 years old, and culminates with all of the siblings returning to their childhood home as adults for a Christmas dinner in 2005 at the height of the Celtic Tiger.
The novel highlights the differences between each of the siblings and the ways in which they all grow apart as they get older and pursue their own lives and careers so that they effectively become strangers — and yet as soon as they’re thrown together for a Christmas celebration all the old tensions, resentments and childhood dynamics come to the fore, almost as if they never moved out of the family home.
Enright takes her time fleshing out all of the characters — most of whom we meet as adults— each of whom is grappling with private difficulties: Dan, who once wanted to be a priest, has reinvented himself as an artist in New York but is living a double life during the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s; Emmet, an aid worker in Africa, has rejected the materialism of the modern world but finds it hard to make meaningful connections with women; Constance, raising her own family in Ireland, has a health scare that she keeps to herself; and Hanna, a first-time mother and struggling actor in Dublin, has an ongoing problem with alcohol.
But it is the central character, Rosaleen, that lends the book its gravitas — and humour. This Irish mammy is manipulative, self-absorbed, living “her entire life requiring things of other people and blaming other people” and vacillating between “a state of hope or regret”.
To read my review in full, please visit my blog.