One of Anne Enright’s earlier books, The Forgotten Waltz (Vintage 2011) is typical of her warm, intimate style and her ability to deconstruct the minutiae of relationships in such a way that we feel we know the characters’ internal motivations and their external conflicts.
This slim, literary page-turner is a love story that begins with the unsettling claim that everything began when ‘the child’ saw the narrator kissing the child’s father, and him kissing her back; she states that ‘If it hadn’t been for the child then none of this might have happened.’ The fact of the child, Evie, and her involvement in the ongoing drama of this love story, with its infidelity and betrayal, somehow elevates what could have been a tawdry affair between adults into a family dynamic that takes on much more meaning and import.
The Preface tells us a little about Evie and why she is a special child, but then the main body of the book focuses on the illicit relationship between Gina (who is married to Conor), and Sean (who is married to Aileen), along with the involvement of Fiona (Gina’s sister) who is married to Shay, and the history of the sisters’ mother and family of origin. It is all a complicated hot mess, skilfully narrated by the author in the first-person voice of Gina as she recollects when exactly the situation became so complex, at what point fortunes might have been reversed, and the incidents and events that, in hindsight, were deal-breakers or points of no return.
Enright is a brilliant and beautiful writer and this story throbs with intense passion, desire, fury, resentment and an aching need to be wanted and loved. Then, when the reader has spent the entire novel fully immersed in the romantic machinations of the adult world, the author returns in the last chapter to the subject of the child, Evie, who is now a little older. Enright had almost allowed the reader to forget about that first Preface – the enigmatic and ambiguous description of Evie; Gina’s original statement that if not for the child, none of the rest would have mattered. And with skilled craftsmanship, Enright delivers detailed information about Evie that changes or enhances what we know (or thought we knew) about her and shifts the focus of the story to a new and unexpected direction. It is a play on the adage that none of us knows the unseen struggles of others, and that people’s actions and motivations may sometimes be underpinned by battles that we know nothing about. This is a very clever ending and the two sections nicely bookend the tumultuous affair; it is almost as if Evie has nothing to do with what happens in this story, and yet she is absolutely at the heart of everything that happens.