Anne Enright

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Anne Enright is in a studio in Dublin. Great to speak with you again, Anne.

Anne Enright: You too Ramona.

Ramona Koval: This is a book about adultery and is set in the boom time, economic flowering of the Irish world, which has since of course faded. What is it about the boom and adultery that go together?

Anne Enright: Well, it's actually set after the boom ended and before we knew where the floor was. It is in that time when Ireland was falling economically and nobody really wanted to admit it really. So I just thought adultery was a great boom-time subject. I'd been looking at boom fiction in America after the war, at Updike and Cheever. I thought adultery is a good indicator of what's going on in a society, about ties loosening, about the possibilities that money brings. But also I just thought the 'why not' of an affair suits the denial of a bubble.

When we say boom, okay, Ireland did not have a commodities boom, it did not have a buying and selling boom of things that had value, it had a bubble, which was a vast and inflated housing and speculative bubble. So there's an unreality about the money. It's hard to know what is real. The sums are thrown around the place and it's all debt, not money, and I thought that's a great subject for...that just really ties in with what happens during an affair, or what might happen during an affair.

Ramona Koval: It's about housing and money and always looking at the neighbour and seeing what they've got. Of course Gina is married to Conor. Let's hear her telling us about Conor and about her marriage to him.

Anne Enright: [Reading from I loved Conor then... to ...church, hotel, bouquet, the lot.]

Ramona Koval: I love that phrase 'mortgage love'.

Anne Enright: Yes, the thing about young people in the first decade of the 21st century in Ireland is they got married all the time, it's all they did, and it was like our generation delayed marriage because we weren't sure about the finances, apart from everything else, but the finances, as far as they were concerned, were just clear, it's what you did. And you absolutely had to buy a flat, a cubbyhole, a semi-d. It wasn't a ladder, it was a kind of conveyor belt or an escalator, you had to get on the escalator, and the feeling is if you missed your step...I don't know what would happen, it would be a disaster. You'd be out of the moneymaking...

Ramona Koval: This idea of the money coming out of the toaster and around the walls and it was like being in a tropical, lush forest.

Anne Enright: Yes, literally just of money. The peculiar situation of your house earning more money than you did. Certainly as a writer that was true of our bricks and mortar. And now they are just bricks and mortar again.

Ramona Koval: And the mortgages are still there unfortunately.

Anne Enright: And the mortgages are still there.

Ramona Koval: She such a romantic, Gina, 'the church, the hotel, the bouquet, the lot'. The chapter headings of your book have got the titles of fabulous old romantic songs like 'Save the Last Dance for Me', 'Dance Me to the End of Love', 'In These Shoes', 'How Can I Be Sure', 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow', 'Secret Love'. Tell me about the use of these titles throughout the book.

Anne Enright: The book is about the bliss and euphoria of falling for someone, apart from anything else. And I think these are basically silly emotions, and music does love better than any other medium I think, that's where love is, it is in the music.

Ramona Koval: She basically goes to a party and sees Sean, this older man, he is grey-haired. She calls him a family man. He is married to Aileen, and he's got a child. She seems to be able to just blinker herself to the fact that he's got a child and that there is something about the child that is not clear. She is not 100% well. But all of these things don't seem to penetrate Gina, do they.

Anne Enright: Well, why would they, she is in love, and if you fall for someone, you're not going to think about anything else but your wonderfully selfish love. It's a consuming passion. Nobody falls for a man and thinks about his daughter, that would be somehow unpleasant. Very few people even would account the person...if you fall for a man and he's married you think, oh, that drab old thing, he couldn't love her because I'm in love with him. I think there is a grandeur as well as a foolishness to at all. But there is without a doubt a huge and wonderful egotism about the state of being in love.

And I think the book is partly about the difference between being in love and loving someone, and that emerges later. I think by the end of the book it is a journey into empathy. By the end of the book she does know what she has done or she knows the wider certainly social implications, but perhaps she knows it on a more existential level, what it is to have a child and how incontrovertible that love is. I love the difference between biological love, this un-asked for, un-chosen thing we have for our children and our siblings, our parents, and chosen romantic love. And this is where she comes bang up against it because Evie, Sean's daughter...she has a childhood illness, she suffers from childhood epilepsy, but the illness is just almost a concentrated form of what it is to worry about a child to any degree.

Ramona Koval: She is a very breezy, funny character, Gina. She is amusing and she has an interesting take on the world. But there's a point at which you suddenly find you don't like her.

Anne Enright: You don't necessarily agree with her.

Ramona Koval: Suddenly you think, actually, there's something kind of silly about her, something not grown-up about her really. She's got this thing, she says, 'What is it about wives? There's this thing they do and they invite the women that their husbands are interested in home for the party...'

Anne Enright: I have seen that happen actually, I have seen wives sense something is wrong and try and bring it close to see what it is, I have seen...

Ramona Koval: And you think the wives are doing that because they want to say 'this is the solid truth of what this man's life is really like and here I am and here's the house', or do they just...what are they trying to do?

Anne Enright: I also have seen wives or husbands say 'she's just in denial', and the wives saying 'no, he denied it, I asked him and he denied it'.

Ramona Koval: So who is in denial then?

Anne Enright: So what is 'in denial'? Denial is a wonderful subject and how we describe ourselves to ourselves, how we remember our lives, how we construct the narratives, these are all things that have interested me throughout all my books. And yes, the wife is a big figure in both their heads, and I don't think we ever see Aileen properly because of course it's the mistress, as it were, who is narrating the affair, so we don't really see her. She is described as this really unprepossessing creature...

Ramona Koval: A very boyish figure, almost a man.

Anne Enright: Yes, she's sort of elegant because she hasn't put on any weight, and how she dresses and all of that is pretty much scorned. But then there is a point in the book where we say, hang on a minute dear, what are you doing here? I wanted the book to be somehow morally poised, and what I enjoy about the book is the different readers' responses. People who are on the side of the wife, as it were, this shadowy figure in the book, strong but shadowy figure, really don't like Gina. And then a friend of mine said, no, I was with her 1,000%, even though...

Ramona Koval: Well, I must be halfway between those points. She says of Sean's and Aileen's house, 'It had that Cotswold gravel and box hedge thing that I hated and wanted it in exactly equal measure, and I walked up to the threshold with the badness on my mind.'

Anne Enright: She just won't do the suburban thing. The first time when she sees Sean at the picnic in her sister's back garden, the barbecue in her sister's back garden, she just is a natural outsider, she is the only person who smokes among all these suburbanites, and she just can't do the thing, she just can't do the 'two kids', she can't enter what she sees as an ordinary life. So for her to have an affair, to have a passion, is an extraordinary thing. And I sort of respect that, to an extent. I mean, I think it is foolish, but I also think to throw yourself off the cliff of your life like that is somehow interesting. And also to refuse the dullness and to refuse the domestic. Yes, we keep refusing it, and it always catches us up one way or the other.

Ramona Koval: She says it's the thing about stolen love, it's important to know who it is you're stealing from. So she goes to this party at his house, she says it's the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin. She examines their bathroom and their bedroom. She begins to stalk really, doesn't she.

Anne Enright: She does, she turns into...she has a minor bunny-boiling phase. But the affair goes through many usual phases. There's a one night stand that turns out to be not a one night stand, there is an office romance, there is the slightly obsessive edge, and somehow (and I think this is a lot like life) they keep trying to avoid this affair, but there is some under-story, there is some undertow that keeps these people together.

Ramona Koval: I want you to read again from the next part, after they've spent a couple of days together, they've engineered a couple of days together, haven't they.

Anne Enright: Yes, and they're in their hotel phase.

Ramona Koval: I must say, just before you read that, you do hotels really, really well. You do the hotel room and the whole thing...

Anne Enright: I wrote some of it in a hotel because the only building site in Ireland is next door to our house, so an amount of it was written in a hotel...

Ramona Koval: I'm not asking questions, Anne, about how you know about the inside of hotels, I'm sure you've stayed in a lot of hotels as an international writer. I'm assuming that.

Anne Enright: My research was extensive! Thank you.

[Reading from 'Gina,' he said slowly... to ...that I would surely die.]

Ramona Koval: Of course the more she has this illicit affair with Sean she starts to get cross with Conor, her husband. It's not fair really, is it.

Anne Enright: She is really cross that he doesn't even know what's going on, how can he not understand her. She is living all this time with a man who doesn't understand her. But also I think that is true to the psychology of it all. As people are rejected they become, as it were, unbearable, as Sean says. And Conor, she sort of stopped believing in Conor, it so sad really. And love is a kind of belief and a loss of belief is a terrible thing. She just stops believing in him, everything he does seems empty to her, like just air.

Ramona Koval: She says something really funny, I can't quite remember now, about how it's amazing, you just have an affair and you just don't have to ever see your in-laws again.

Anne Enright: Yes, that is amazing, she just says you have to sleep with someone and get caught, and you never have to meet your mother-in-law again. The mother-in-law comes to stay and she is quite a glamorous woman, a publican's wife from the countryside, and she says at breakfast time, 'you know, I always think two pillowcases is more hygienic than just one,' which drives Gina nuts. There's a small domestic reality in the fact that they've spent so much money on this tacky little house where the sockets move in the walls, and it just doesn't seem like, for her, that it meets her ambition, either emotionally or...she is quite an ambitious chick in the world, in terms of...there are vast amounts of money that people spent in those days just to have a really low quality of life, living far from work, commuting a lot, and saying isn't it brilliant, our house is more expensive than a condo in Manhattan. You have the boom now, don't you, in Australia?

Ramona Koval: Well, the real estate is now getting a little bit harder to move, so it is not at all quite the same. Because we've got mining and everything remember.

Anne Enright: Commodities, yes.

Ramona Koval: Yes, we've got real things. In part two, it's after the crash, they have been found out, but she is in her dead mother's house, her marriage is...she is split up with Conor...it's another house, there are a lot of houses in this book, and she is in her dead mother's house. She says, 'It is easy to shout, like being 12 again.' That's really true, isn't it, about...although I haven't had that experience for a very, very long time, but I can imagine that. I know that when my kids come home they can behave like much younger people.

Anne Enright: Yes, I still go to my mother and father's house for sympathy, a middle-aged woman moping about silly things, and these very elderly people cheer me up and set me on my feet again and then I leave.

Ramona Koval: But reality sort of hits her little bit in this house.

Anne Enright: Again, she is trying to escape this affair, this is not their intention, it is not their intention that their marriage should break up. They think they're getting away with it. It is not their intention to fall in love. At one stage she says that after the sex they were careful not to talk too much, because they were wary about getting on too well, that it didn't suit either of them to get on too well as friends, as human beings. But they do get on really well. But the thing that really interrupts the fantasy arc of it all is the death of her mother. She doesn't ever move out from her married home but she takes to wandering around her mother's house where her childhood is and trying to think, as they tried to sell the mother's house over two years and failed to, what it is, what does the bricks and mortar contain, not just her childhood but the lost idea that her mother had of her childhood, that her mother kept this version, this story of their youth in their bedrooms. So when they take out all the stuff, they're throwing out their mother's memories of them as well as their own. I'm just very interested in interior spaces. Money is always interesting, but houses contain much more than money, or the money is foolish when you think about what the memories are or the value of a place and of home. Anyway, the mother's old house, the house where she grew up is the space in which the relationship starts to happen again with Sean.

Ramona Koval: She says she spent days trying to guess what Aileen might say so she could say something different, being the 'not wife'. That's very, very interesting.

Anne Enright: Well, again, the ghost of the wife is always there. I've talked to people in second relationships who say I don't give a damn about what so-and-so thinks about...you know, the whole thing with stepchildren and handing over stepchildren and the endless scheduling that goes into all that, and the dominant figure of this aggrieved Medea figure, from Greek drama, the aggrieved wife. The emotion there is astonishing. So they have to deal with all that.

I met a guy once and he had just split up from his wife in what seemed to me the most ridiculous midlife crisis. He said the thing that really annoyed him about his wife was the way she'd always predict when he would get a cold, if he went on a plane to America she'd say you know you're going to get a cold, and it would drive him crazy. So he had actually got on a plane, and he was talking to me now, without a cold, presumably because he'd got rid of the wife who had predicted it. It's intriguing when people become so intermeshed that the struggle to part is both petty and huge.

Ramona Koval: When they do get together she says, 'It was in a spooky way just like being married. I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it's like the same life in a dream; a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook.' It's the difference between having an affair and actually being with somebody.

Anne Enright: I'm hugely interested in transcendence and transformation. Coming from a religious Catholic upbringing, I'm very wary of transcendence and very wary of the thing that women often have, the feeling of the miracle of the outside intervention, you get 'the man'. I was also reared to think that somehow, you get 'the man' and your life will be transformed, you'll become Cinderella into the princess basically. So here she is, and she is not the princess particularly, she is still cleaning the hearth one way or the other, and I don't mean that in terms of domestic labour, but there hasn't been a transformation that all the fairytales lead us to believe there will be. She is the same person, and it comes very strongly from a personal belief that you can only be happy where you are. You always bring yourself, where you travel or where you go in life, there is no escaping the self, and transcendence is...I'm not saying it is not possible...anyway, transformation or transcendence is difficult and it only comes from within. Anyway, that's me being full of hooey about what is a very ordinary phenomenon. You think everything is going to change, you hunger for change, and then you find it's still the same.

Ramona Koval: She is a very silly girl.

Anne Enright: Ah, you just don't like her, Ramona, because...

Ramona Koval: No, I do...

Anne Enright: You said to me on the stage at Edinburgh, you said, 'What do we do with these men who run off with younger women?' And I thought, oh, I don't know. It was just one of those impossible questions. It was one of the seeds of the book though as well; what do we do with these men?

Ramona Koval: Because you had read a short story then, I remember, about a man who'd had an affair with a young woman who ended up dying in an accident...

Anne Enright: She died in a car crash, that's right.

Ramona Koval: And the wife put flowers on her grave because she was a young woman and because she died, and she was more connected with this young tragic woman then the husband was, it turned out.

Anne Enright: Indeed, the husband was just having his fun, and then the fun turned sort of odd when the girl involved dies, and the wife, who is all encompassing, I mean, she is one of these women that you couldn't ever get away from I think, she encompasses the affair and the death in her embrace basically by putting the flowers on the grave. She is reclaiming him as well as making the event significant.

Ramona Koval: What I was meaning when I said what I said, this kid, she suddenly realises that he's got a child and she sort of doesn't even ask him early on in this affair what's going on with the daughter. It is taking her a long time to ask how he was feeling about his daughter and what his relationship with his daughter was and what the experience of having the child was and having the child go through this illness and finding what it was. And you suddenly realise...she says, 'He doesn't speak that way to me,' she says of his relationship with his daughter. And this is it, she doesn't get it. She is one of those people who have never had a child, she is never had to love somebody who has come from her body and the way you love them, no matter what, what they look like, what they are like, how they relate to you. It's about unconditional love.

Anne Enright: Yes, when I first had children I realised that my life as a non-breeder was like looking at these women with babies on the other side of the glass, it was like they were in an aquarium, it was like they inhaled different stuff, because it was such a categorical shift for me. I'm not particularly moral about whether women should or shouldn't have children, I think it has been one of the great pleasures in my life, but I do recognise that if you don't have children, that they are just a sort of nuisance and an annoyance. And this insane love that parents have for their children, the endlessness of it, the pettiness, the conversations that go on and on, the management of tantrums, all that kind of thing, it's just bizarre. You just look at it and say, oh, give us all a break will you.

And also the fact that, as my family say to me, of course you're the only person who ever had a baby. That is another kind of egotism and another kind of loving egotism, this huge maternal roar which, in Sean's case, turns to anxiety when Evie gets ill when she is four or five. From the outside this is all a very peculiar world, the world of small children, or even of grown-up children, it's just...and it has its own selfishness, although that's not really one of the themes of the book. I mean, Gina does come to understand what it is for the child to exist in the world, not for the child to have come from her own body or to be biologically linked to her or incontrovertibly loved by her, but she does come to not just a rapprochement with the child who, as far as she's concerned, has taken so much of her lover's time and affection and is so absolutely tied to him, but she does come to see her as a beautiful human being and a sort of miracle, which is what children are. And that's what parents see all the time...well, apart from when they see dirty faces and bad attitudes, they do see the miracle, you know.

Ramona Koval: But she realises that making a life with him means making a relationship with his daughter who is a real person, finally, and not just theoretical, and who is able to call her to account.

Anne Enright: Well, she is a thinking human being, and at the end of the book she looks at Gina and Gina knows what she's thinking, she is thinking 'you're the one who broke up my parents' marriage'. But as Gina herself says, it could have been anyone, the marriage was heading that way anyway, and Evie says, no, but it was you. I don't want to give away the ending of the book particularly, but she is also looking at Gina as a potentially interesting, nice, new, connected person in her life. She just has that innocence that you can't get around.

Ramona Koval: But unlike Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, you're not killing her in the end, are you.

Anne Enright: No, both those adulteresses committed suicide, and Gina certainly does not commit suicide and you do feel that there will be a second act in her life, whatever it is. But she does see what she has done, and I think that's pretty strong medicine actually.

Ramona Koval: So how has the book been received in Ireland? Is adultery something you can talk about in Ireland?

Anne Enright: Well, I presume we couldn't afford adultery until 2001. My research was both extensive and useless because nobody pretended to know anything about it, and then you'd get hints and digs and sly bits and pieces that you would piece together in the quietness of your own heart, and you'd say, oh well, maybe there's more of it than I thought. It's a very family-based society, and when divorce came in in Ireland there wasn't a huge rush for the law courts. But like every society, yes, adultery happens here too, and it happens in a kind of old-fashioned way in that it is not just serial monogamy, marriage still is marriage in Ireland, very strongly so.

Ramona Koval: So it is a serious thing to break it up?

Anne Enright: Yes, for sure. How has it been received in Ireland? I think Ireland is so obsessed about itself, talks about itself endlessly and how we messed up the boom and who's to blame and who will pay...

Ramona Koval: You're coming to Australia now again.

Anne Enright: Am I?

Ramona Koval: No, I mean all the Irish people are coming to Australia. Did you think I was saying you personally? I think you'll be okay, Anne Enright, Booker Prize winner, I think you'll be all right in Ireland, don't worry.

Anne Enright: No, I just wondered had I not looked at my schedule recently, I might be going to some festival that I hadn't realised, and it is quite a long journey. The Irish are going to Australia again, it's one of the key destinations.

Ramona Koval: Well, another Anne Enright triumph, I think we can say, The Forgotten Waltz, which is published by Jonathan Cape. Anne Enright, it's always a pleasure speaking with you.

Anne Enright: With you too Ramona.

Anne Enright: Irish writer. Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for literature

Title : The Forgotten Waltz

Author: Ann Enright

Publisher: Jonathan Cape