The Wren, the Wren

LoveReading Says

Threaded with poetry, Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is a magnificent, character-driven meditation on motherhood and daughterhood. From the conflicted pain of separation and the need to fly the nest, to the joy of fledging and the bitter-sweet pride of seeing your offspring fly free, the journeys taken by this novel’s principle protagonists strike a profound chord.

Nell is a young content writer who aspires to write more than the poorly-paid travel articles she’s currently employed to pen, and whose grandfather Phil was an Irish poet of some reputation. Between Nell and Phil, there’s Nell’s mother Carmel, a woman who believes “having a pain means you are self-obsessed, because being self-obsessed comes first and having a pain comes second.” In addition, as Nell notes, “You can’t tell Carmel you have a problem or she’ll go out and beat someone up for you.” 

After enduring a toxic relationship that led to her finding “it hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways”, Nell travels the world and writes travel articles, all the while observing birds.

Meanwhile, a second narrative slips to Carmel’s youth, from being Phil’s “birdy” as a child, to when she fell pregnant with Nell. A heart-stopping line describing Carmel’s bond with Nell as a baby cuts to the core of this remarkable novel: “They looked at each other, and all of time was there. The baby knew how vast her mother’s loneliness had been.”

At the same time, the women’s narratives are interspersed with poems, and Phil’s story. Then, when Nell returns from her travels, there’s a beautiful, moving moment when Carmel overhears Nell talking to her new boyfriend and realises “her daughter had come back to her true self. She was grown.”

Subtle and powerful to the bone, The Wren, The Wren casts a captivating spell.

Joanne Owen

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