The Forgotten Waltz
by Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape HK$229
It's been four years since Irish author Anne Enright shot to global literary prominence with her 2007 Booker Prize-winning fourth novel, The Gathering. A bleak, sometimes darkly humorous novel about a dysfunctional Irish family, it is also a subtle portrait of a country that, as Enrights put it, 'was drowning in shame'.
Now with her fifth novel, The Forgotten Waltz, Enright examines Ireland's devastating economic crash through the lens of desire. A sharply observed page turner of a novel that unfolds with the immediacy and intimacy of a confidential chat with a close friend, The Forgotten Waltz begins as Gina Moynihan recalls the moment she first laid eyes on Sean Vallely, a married man 15 years her senior.
At first there is nothing remarkable about this man who she first glimpses tending to his daughter at the bottom of her sister's garden one sunny summer Iniskerry afternoon in 2002. Nothing to suggest that Gina's eventual longing for this man, her sister's neighbour, will wreak havoc and destruction on her comfortable middle-class life and that of those around her. Moreover, Sean has the added complication of a young daughter who suffers from epilepsy.
Looking back Gina can see that at this juncture, Vallely was 'just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again if he does not turn round'. But Sean does turn round and this fleeting moment, which takes place at her sister's barbecue years before the affair actually begins, is fused into Gina's memory as the moment when life as she knew it began to unravel.
And what an unravelling it is. All the more devastating and confounding because you can see it coming but Gina is blind to the signs. But there is simply no turning away from this tale, so brutal in its honesty, so precise in its detail, so subtle and seemingly effortless in its calibration. The story is seen through the prism of Gina's memory. As she looks back on these events on a snowy winter's day in 2009, there is a cinematic, almost gilded quality to that moment at her sister's housewarming barbecue, when she had just returned from a three week holiday in Australia with her boyfriend Conor, 'and was 'mad - just mad - into chardonnay'.'
Enright brings a lilting exactitude to Gina's memories, right down to the little fake plastic log house for the children and her sister Fiona, 'her cheeks a hectic pink, her eyes suddenly wet from the sheer la-la-lah of pouring wine and laughing gaily and being a beautiful mother forward slash hostess in her beautiful new house'.