Book Review: The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, a sparkling family story of love, betrayal and reunion.
Nell is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. Over them both falls the long shadow of Carmel’s famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.
From our greatest chronicler of family life, The Wren, The Wren is a story of the love that can unite us, and the individual acts that threaten this vital bond.
Published by Penguin Australia
Released September 2023
My Thoughts:I liked this one, but I didn’t love it. I read a few reviews after finishing as I couldn’t seem to quite put my finger on what I thought about it, what I felt were the key themes, and if I were perhaps ‘missing’ something. But it strikes me as a novel that is very much open to reader interpretation.
So, my interpretation is that this is a novel about the havoc wrecked upon the lives of four women by one man: poet, husband, father, and grandfather. The story is told alternately between Nell, the granddaughter in this family, and her mother, the daughter of the famed poet. These are not the only two women affected by the patriarch of the family. Through Carmel’s perspective, we see the way her mother and her sister were also impacted by his brutality and abandonment, along with the lingering legacy of his fame and beautiful poems.
This novel is very much a character study, a deep dive into the ways in which fathers, both absent and present, may shape a woman’s relationships with other men. We witness Carmel’s indifference to men, Nell’s vulnerability and attraction to violent men, and on the periphery, many other women whom the poet was involved with and affected by his disaffection and whimsical brutality, including Carmel’s sister and mother. In the middle of the novel, there is one chapter offered from his perspective, a younger version of him, at a defining moment, whereby we see the beginnings of his tendency to dismiss women for his own gain.
The Wren, The Wren is beautifully written and complex, however, I felt removed from the story as it didn’t seem to be anything more than a character study. But as I mentioned above, I do believe it is very much open to reader interpretation, so I would encourage anyone who has been eyeing it off to still give it a read. The chapters are broken up by passages of poetry, inserted to appear as the work of the poet, I thought, but I could be wrong about that. Either way, it was a lovely way to structure the novel and was thematically on point for the story.
