It’s a story about family that is bookended by two family meals, which should indicate what you’re letting yourself in for.
But perhaps that is Anne Enright’s gift; it’s not that simple to describe what she’s trying to do unless you crawl under this family’s skin and listen to their different stories and how they experience their determinedly dextrous mother who likes to control them in any way she can.
After all, they’re all there because of her, so why shouldn’t they be dancing to her tune?
But that’s also too simplistic a précis of this tale about children and their chosen paths – how they decide to live their lives even if you try to make it as much guided by your wishes as theirs. It’s probably not going to happen.
One of the most unpredictable journeys of life is that of family.
Just when you think you have puzzled things out, something happens that makes you stop in your tracks and reflect on your life.
Perhaps that’s exactly what Enright wants to consider.
The more you think you have things under control and the more you believe you are in charge of your own life, the more things happen that seem to set you in an opposite direction, something you never had in mind.
It’s that, as well as how you are influenced by your growing-up years – the impact of every flick of the hair from anyone that’s important.
Nothing might have been intended by something that influenced the way you behaved for the next 20 years – but only sometimes do we discover the causes of the peculiar twists our life take which we had thought were destiny. There’s much more choice involved than many would want you to believe.
The Irish seem to be born storytellers and Enright has, as one would expect of a Man Booker winner, a winning way with words.
It’s that sassiness of the Irish tongue, but it’s also the delving into her characters, the richness of a family raised by a mother with spunk – even when often alienating – and what that will mean to the siblings who run to different ends of the earth, it seems, and as a result, turn into extremely rare creatures.
It’s a gentle tale, even though some of the insight is harrowing, but that’s what happens when families are under the spotlight.
If you’re really going to turn them upside down and pull them apart, you will have to allow the reader to discover their own insights, which will probably be coloured by personal experience.
That holds true for all reading but Enright knows how to tap this. In the end, you’re the one to benefit. So, if you want some quiet time there’s much to explore, recognise and turn inside out here. That’s what families do, don’t they?
* The Green Road by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape London