Actress - Anne Enright

Back before I had even read any of her work, I nonetheless had the impression, mainly based on the accounts of The Gathering, that Anne Enright wrote mainly about women and difficult family situations. Despite the acclaim and awards, that didn't strike me as a subject that I would find interesting and when I finally got around to reading The Green Road it turned out to be a mostly accurate view of her typical subject matter but it was also clearly just a brilliant piece of writing. Having got past the inaccurate impression of it being an off-putting subject then, Actress seemed a more approachable book. A fictional account of a writer's memories of her mother, a once famous Irish actress who caused a scandal at the end of her carer by shooting a film producer in the foot, it seems again like the familiar territory of women in difficult family relationship, but in the hands of Anne Enright it's also much more than that.

The story focusses on this as a central point, as if unravelling the circumstances that led to this inexplicable event might throw some light for the narrator on the otherwise enigmatic figure of a mother she has never fully understood. If you are going to try to get to the bottom of that mystery, you need to have some insight into the peculiarities of Irish society in this period, and indeed what it meant for anyone who stepped outside the strict moral social, religious codes and expectations placed on women in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. If there was one place where you could dare to be different, it's in the acting profession. It's practically written into the job description and perhaps attracted people like Katherine O’Dell for just that reason, to join "the special category of Irish celebrity who was allowed to have lovers without public recrimination".

Being Anne Enright the two big themes that inevitably arise out of this are the challenges faced by women and the nature of Irish society, and indeed where the two of those themes cross over. As with The Green Road, in Actress, Enright takes the woman out of Ireland and outside of its restrictive practices, beliefs and expectations in order to examine that relationship all the more closely and incisively through the contrast it presents. After touring the small towns and townlands of Ireland with her family as a child, getting her first exposure to the life of being someone else on the stage, Katherine O'Dell becomes a star in the West End and then on Broadway before gaining roles in film. This opens her eyes to a world that she could never have imagined in Ireland, but while she might openly flout with conventions, it seems that the vices of others back home in Ireland were just better hidden and tolerated as long as they remained unspoken.

That would appear to be the rationale for her mother refusing to speak to her daughter Norah about many things, including the strange men she would see her mother with. There is also the question of who her father is that remains a mystery, the publicity machine agents ensuring that such things remain out of public knowledge. So more than just being about retracing her mother's career for clues as to her true nature that was perhaps hidden behind the glamour and attraction of her profession and her fame, the book she is writing is as much about trying to understand herself. Norah wants to know who she is by better understanding a mother who was always playing a role, evening acting at being an actress. And indeed, she proves to be hard to pin down, her life appearing to be little more than a series of anecdotes. The anecdotes however are revealing in their own way of attitudes and behaviours and there is a lovely turn of phrase now and again - "Hard to know if she had lost a man or gained a story" - but at other times, the goings-on of the acting community are hard to fathom.

Actress is a hard novel to define. It's about the mother as an actress and it's not; the mother-daughter situation complicated and full of self-denials and contradictions. It's hard to say what the novel is really about or even be sure that it really reveals anything of greater significance than a wander through Ireland’s politics, religion and society in the recent past - a world that is already changing beyond recognition. lt presents an image of the country aligned to or associated with a woman who also presents an idealised image of herself, when underneath she is beset with bitterness and madness. I don't think you are meant to see this strictly as a metaphor, but it is a way that allows the author to explore the mass of contradictions at the heart of relationships, family and identity with a distinct Irish character. You could associate and align Enright with a similar literary heritage that explores such topics - one of many new female voices now being heard in Irish literature - but the insights and skill with which she opens up the past to the present in Actress, while they are not always easy to fathom or explain, are impressive nonetheless.

Reading notes: Actress by Anne Enright was first published in 2020. I read the Vintage paperback edition, 2021. I will definitely get around to The Gathering at a suitable time.