The cold, harsh reality of modern love

FICTION: CATHERINE HEANEYreviews The Forgotten WaltzBy Anne Enright Jonathan Cape, 230pp, £16.99

LIKE ANY author whose last novel won the Man Booker Prize, Anne Enright could have followed up such a career-defining success with as grandiose a story as she chose. She might have set her sights on writing the great Irish novel of the bust, or broadened her focus on the darker undercurrents of family relationships, so intensely and intimately explored in 2007's The Gathering, to create something epic in scope.

Instead, in The Forgotten Waltz, which is published next Thursday, she has written a love story for our times, a compelling account of a quietly havoc-wreaking affair that topples the comfortable stability of its characters' middle-class Dublin lives.

It is winter 2009 and snow clouds hang over the city as Gina Moynihan looks back at the events of the previous years.

She remembers a barbecue on a sunny afternoon long ago when she was a successful young woman with a likeable boyfriend, Conor, “whose heart was steady, and whose body was so solid and warm”. They were part of Ireland’s ambitious new generation who couldn’t quite believe their good fortune but enjoyed its trappings. They were working at IT companies, taking holidays in Australia and buying their first home.

It was at the bottom of her sister’s garden in Enniskerry that Gina saw Seán Vallely for the first time – he absorbed in dealing with his young daughter – and everything changed.

Seen through the prism of memory in the suspended reality of a snowy afternoon, this encounter (though it is barely even that) comes back to Gina as she contemplates everything that happened thereafter.

On the surface there is nothing particularly remarkable about this man who is to be both the undoing and the making of her. Seán is a management consultant almost 20 years her senior, “wiry and compact”, with intelligent grey eyes. Looking back she can see that at this point he was “just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again if he does not turn around”. But he does.

This fleeting moment, crystallised in Gina’s mind in cinematic detail, takes place years before the affair actually begins, yet it provides the starting point from which she unravels the spool of memories and encounters that will eventually lead her to the present and back to the Terenure home of her childhood.

In chapters named after song titles, she recounts her subsequent marriage to Conor and her work at Rathlin Communications. There are office parties, children’s birthdays and sunny days at Brittas Bay, in hindsight all infused with the folly and braggadocio of the boom.

These provide some superb set-pieces, chief among them an ostentatious New Year’s Day party described with Enright’s trademark caustic wit as “the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin”.

And there is, of course, the affair, which starts with a drunken one-night stand on a business trip to Switzerland and progresses through a series of stolen Friday afternoons in airport hotels, where an intense, almost feral lust slowly gives way to something sweeter: “We laughed when we kissed and we laughed at every button and reluctant zip, and it was all hunger and recognition and delight.”

Along with the delight, however, there are the everyday duplicities of infidelity – the text messages, the secret glances in the company of friends and partners – and the discovery. After a weekend in Sligo, Gina decides she can take no more and tries to end the affair – but it is too late. They have fallen in love.

In another writer’s hands, this might be the end of the story; with Enright, it’s not that simple. In the wake of Gina and Seán’s love lies the wreckage of two marriages and, at the centre of it all, his peculiar, fragile daughter Evie.

It is Evie, “Seán’s beautiful mistake”, who book-ends the novel. She is present at their first fleeting encounter in the garden and is given the last word that snowy afternoon. “If it hadn’t been for the child,” muses Gina, “none of this might have happened.”

And in truth, not a huge amount happens in The Forgotten Waltz, but Enright is not interested in plot-driven pyrotechnics or the exact chronology of when lust turned into love. As Gina herself says, "Don't ask me when this happened, or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point."

AUTHOR AND CHARACTER are both more intrigued by the slow burn of attraction so that when it takes hold, it does so with the speed and ferocity of a forest fire.

When Gina describes seeing Seán again, angry at his cold behaviour after their initial tryst, she is amazed to find that “a man I would cross the street to avoid at nine o’clock – by nine twenty-five I wanted to fuck him until he wept”.

This simple, shocking expression of desire is typical of Enright, who, in a single sentence, conjures up that violent pendulum swing of emotion that can blow whole worlds apart.

Nor is it just in her anatomising of Seán and Gina's affair that she gives free rein to her gift for unfailingly astute and wry observation of human behaviour. Returning to the theme of family, which she plumbed so deeply in The Gathering, Enright again explores the push and pull of sibling love (the often fraught relationship between Gina and her perfect, pretty sister Fiona is brilliantly drawn) and the bittersweet bonds between parents and children.

Here again is the ghost of an absent father, who occasionally went missing and “came home and was shaggy and large with us”; and a mother who was once a great beauty, but is now distracted and alone, though still impeccably turned out.

Each little gesture and flare-up of feeling is catalogued in spare and spiky prose. This is the great pleasure of reading Enright: her sheer virtuoso control of language, those compact sentences, with their occasional flares of lyrical beauty and emotional force.

As Gina turns things over in her mind, The Forgotten Waltzbecomes a dance of sorts – a slow-turning cycle of events inscribed in memory that never arrives at an end point or a resolution, but brings her back, again and again– full circle – to love.

CATHERINE HEANEYis a contributing editor of The Glossmagazine