Christmas is a strange time of year for many families.
By turns wondrous, magical and one-of-a-kind, a chance for far-flung and emotionally disparate members to come together in some form of togetherness, it can also feel like an endurance test, a trial of of sorts that begins at the airport or front door of the family home and doesn’t stop until something dramatic has happened or everyone has simply fallen away back into the ether once more.
Whatever the trajectory of Christmas, and let’s face it, who doesn’t wish for a fairytale family gathering, even if that seems as unlikely as everyone getting along right through and beyond the serving of the pudding, the bonds of familial togetherness are severely tested or revealed, yet again, to have never been there in the first place.
So it is in Anne Enright’s transcendent novel The Green Road – the title refers to an actual wild road which wraps itself along the untamed coast of County Clare in the west of Ireland- where the Madigan clan gather for one last Christmas in the ancestral home, such as it is in all its long-past, leaking glory, blighted not just by a home redolent with memories both reassuring and most distinctly otherwise.
Taking place over 30 years or so in which the four siblings – golden boy Dan, dependable Constance, fraught Emmet and bewildered Hanna – leave their small world of Aardheevin and venture out into a world where everything seems possible, and yet entirely dissatisfying all at once.
“The bed where Pat Madigan finally died, his body wasted by the cancer until all that was left of him was the scaffolding. By, my goodness, he made a great ruin, for having been so well built, those big hinging bones, the joints getting larger and the cheekbones more proud, as the meat melted back and spirit of the man broke through.” (P. 162)
For the thing that hovers over all the Madigan siblings is the shadow of mother Rosaleen who does not react to the vicissitudes of life like most mothers do.
When Dan announces in one of the early chapters that he is going into the priesthood, Rosaleen does not handle it well, losing herself in food and then in emotional and physical isolation in her bedroom, a manipulative form of censure that everyone is used to in one sense but which scars them even if they are not aware of the effect it has on them until well into adulthood. (In contrast, non-confrontational Pat simply walks out and pretends nothing much is awry, though he clearly is unhappy too.)
It s a dynamic that accompanies the family into adulthood, culminating in one memorably typical Christmas in 2005 when Rosaleen swings between love, biting criticism and withering self-interest that manifests a passive-aggressive back and forth to which no one has any real defense and with which there is no hope of actual or meaningful engagement.
At every stage of The Green Road, which is divided between a first half given over the life of the family as a hole in its younger incarnation and the adult journeys of each sibling, and a second half which details the Christmas in question, Enright vividly portrays a family who wants the picture-postcard everything but is resigned to the fact that they will, in all likelihood, never quite get it.
What is so riveting about this remarkable book is the wholly original way in which Enright brings the individual and collective crises of the family so vividly to life that it never for a moment feels like some tired Lifetime movie of the week.
Yes, there is discord and disharmony, and a wholly tense finish to a Christmas Day no one is ever likely to forget, but it is never rendered as some kind of melodramatic tosh, easily discarded or ignored.
Each of the siblings, and a still defiant, repentant then then defiant all over again Rosaleen, are not irredeemably awful or happily flawed; rather they are very real people, grappling with lives that promised a great deal and never really delivered on the advertised possibilities.
Perhaps after the emotional back-and-forth chaos of life with Rosaleen who expresses her love with sniping cruelty, a contradiction that not even she fully understands nor wants, everyone expect that life thereafter couldn’t help but be wholly uplifting and good.
That it hasn’t quite worked out that way hasn’t left resentment in its wake but rather puzzlement, a stinging sense that there isn’t enough love, money or fulfillment and no one is completely sure why.
“Then he faced back into the horrors of the Madigans – their small hearts (his was not entirely huge) and the small lives they put themselves through. Emmet closed his eyes and tilted his face up, and there she was; his mother, closing her eyes and lifting her head, in just the same way, down in the kitchen in Ardheevin. Her shadow moving through him. He had to shake her out of himself like a wet dog.” (P. 210)
The Green Road presents us in the most poetic yet grindingly realistic way possible – Enright’s writing is never less than powerfully alive and richly descriptive, of people, places and events – with an authentically real family who long to be connected, long to be truly together but seem too far gone to pull off that particular Christmas miracle.
Dan and Constance try in their own ways to either bring it about or smooth over the troubled waters – the scene where Enright describes Constance’s shopping trip into the Apocalypse of Christmas Eve shopping, in an attempt to prop up the Madigans broken Christmas with every foodstuff imaginable, is beguilingly, amusingly memorable – while Emmet and Hanna have long since given up, consigning themselves and their family to the abyss of lost causes.
For all this bleakness however, there is something utterly enrapturing about the Madigans, a family which is, like many others, hoping for the best but left holding the very worst or the irretrievably indifferent or antagonistic, depending on the moment.
This is life as it is lived, not as we hope to live it, and because of that, The Green Road also comes with slivers of hope that there is yet a chance to make things right, or at least not as wrong as they currently are.
It doesn’t come to fruition in the book but it is there, tantalising everyone with the possibility of renewal, however distant or unlikely.
Quite whether it ever eventuates is anybody’s guess but The Green Road is not completely hopeless, holding onto the terrible sadness of frayed belonging with the slightest sense that while there is hope, there is some possibility bonds might be renewed; this is however real life, where Christmas miracles are thin on the ground, and the Madigans may never quite get their happily ever after out in County Clare or anywhere else for that matter.