Review by Katherine Woodfine
The latest short story collection from Man Booker prizewinner Anne Enright is well named Taking Pictures. This is, after all, a book which resembles a gallery of photographs, conjuring up a vivid series of grainy mug-shots, faded family portraits, creased holiday snaps, simultaneously commonplace and yet alive with nostalgia and resonance. Each of these finely tuned lyrical stories provides us with a tantalising glimpse into the secret lives of quite ordinary women, reaching beyond the surface of everyday domestic existence to hint at the intricacies and nuances of unspoken fears, hopes and betrayals. For each of the women in Enright’s portrait gallery seem to be haunted by ghosts of one kind or another, just as Michelle, in “Caravan”, feels herself to be, quite literally, haunted by the spirit of a woman who had “died playing cards while her children slept, within hands’ reach, in the room next door”.
These stories do not always make for very comfortable reading. Enright, as a writer, holds nothing back: it is evident that like the unhappy narrator of “Here’s to Love”, she is determined to “tell it like it is”. Her prose-style is sharp-eyed and fiercely unsentimental, her characters casually shrug their way through the raw pain of loss and disappointment, and her tone often feels alarmingly bleak. But this collection is nothing if not unpredictable, and so there is always a wry, subversive humour which cuts through the darkness: Enright is mistress of the sharp one-liner, as exemplified by an elderly lady who sums up her offensive neighbour as a “horrible person… the kind of man who’d be sarcastic to a dog.” But ultimately, what makes these stories linger long after the book is closed are the hints of final redemption which Enright offers: as in “Pillow” where the confused Alison at last finds herself able to locate “me… my very self, fluttering in my chest and trying to get out of there, exultant, like it had been living in the wrong person and was finally going home.”
Taking Pictures by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, £12.99) is out now.
Katherine Woodfine is a sometime writer and expert procrastinator. She blogs about writing, art and red shoes at www.followtheyellowbrick.blogspot.com