Exclusive interview with Booker Prize winner Irish author Anne Enright

Enright talks about her past successes and tells us about her eagerly anticipated new novel, 'The Forgotten Waltz'

Enright admits she has enjoyed the strong reactions it evokes in its readers. Married women have condemned her young heroine whilst giving the man in the equation a pass. Younger women have taken a kinder view. Men have had distinctive responses too.

“People read the book very much by their own lights. Women especially judge Gina very strongly, which is part of the fun for me.

“If there is ambiguity in the book – and I love a bit of moral ambiguity – it’s between the reader and Gina, and her refusal to recognize what she’s saying. I had a lot of fun doing that. Because we don’t always know what we’re doing and we don’t always know what we’re talking about. It’s a very rare thing that you really do know what you’re doing actually.”

The vagaries of Gina’s emotions suited the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger boom, Enright says. “It suited an affair, it suited falling in love. After all the noise and clatter and the falling apart of that decade, that’s the moment when something else comes stealing in. That’s the moment when grace becomes possible. That moment of grace comes at the end of the book,” she says.

The Forgotten Waltz is told entirely from Gina’s point of view, but Enright misses no opportunity to signal to us what’s really in play.

“We have intimations of the truth of it all, but she doesn’t necessarily. People say Sean’s wife is boring in the book but actually it’s Gina who thinks she’s boring, which is a completely different idea.”

At all times Enright looks at Ireland through a modern, urban perspective that has eluded almost every other contemporary Irish writer. Her characters don’t agonize over their national identity, they simply belong to their city and suburb and the wider European continent in which they make their careers.

“Gina does mention the north when she’s driving up the M1,” says Enright, agreeing that grappling with her Irish identity is a complete non-starter for Gina.

“She mentions at one point that it’s not her favorite road in Ireland because it’s too straight and too flat. But she also mentions that she always loves the way the clouds gather over the Mourne Mountains, which she calls the gateway to the black north. There be weather, she tells herself, laughing.

“So the Irish identity thing is not something she thinks about. She’s a middle class Dubliner, her father was a solicitor and a drunk.  And although I don’t mention this in the book, a Fianna Fail handler delivered the flowers that were sent to his funeral.

“My husband is much more party politically interested than I am. I just think that the local Irish story in economic terms has been a global story too. Ireland has been a canary in the coal mine when it comes to economic melt down.”

Although she doesn’t address it directly, in the book what happened to the world economy in September 2008 has had such a strong affect on Irish people’s lives that it went far beyond our democratic reach.

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Nster.com