A new Anne Enright is always worth looking out for although it has to be said I still have a copy of Actress, her last novel, sitting unread on my shelves. Of course, that didn’t stop me putting up my hand for The Wren, The Wren when I spotted it. Enright’s new novel follows a mother and her daughter whose lives have been overshadowed by their poet ancestor.

I look at the photograph many, many times. I think I am his leavings. I am the thing he cannot finish or throw away.

Nell is the daughter of Carmel, the product of a short fling with one of her language students. Recently graduated, she’s chosen to live in a squalid houseshare rather than stay with her fiercely independent mother with whom she has a scratchy relationship. Nell gets by writing website content, sometimes not managing to leave her cramped room for days at a time. She misses her university friends while making no new ones, becomes involved in a coercive relationship in which sex is either perfunctory or edged with violence and most weekends visits Carmel who tries not to exert her own control. When their self-mythologising poet father had left the family, his wife ill with cancer, Carmel’s sister had taken over the household, perpetuating the violence that Phil had occasionally doled out. Now long dead and even longer out of fashion, Phil had burnished his reputation as a love poet, taking himself off to the US where he divorced and married again. Nell had never met her grandfather, and Carmel had not seen him since she was a child, but Phil has thrown a long shadow.

It also went without saying that, when Carmel had her own baby, many years later, she did not give it to any man. That would be like holding it out at arm’s length and dropping it right there, on to the concrete.  

Enright tells these two women’s stories through alternating narratives together with a single section from Phil. Scattered throughout are overly romantic poems, samples of Phil’s somewhat cheesy style, in which he extols the virtues of the love which he’d failed to practice in life. Both women are astutely drawn, although for me Carmel was the more successful character. The tensions between them work well: Carmel’s surprised consuming love for her daughter and Nell’s need to escape it but inability to resist its draw. Nell’s relationship with Felim is uncomfortably believable, the thread of coercion running from Phil through to his granddaughter smartly done. Themes of love, family and its legacy are familiar from Enright’s previous novels; it’s emotional territory she handles expertly, and her writing is reliably excellent but, although I found her new novel absorbing and enjoyable, somehow it doesn’t quite match The Gathering or The Green Road for me.

Vintage Publishing: London ‎ 9781787334601 208 pages Hardback (read via NetGalley)