Dancing into the light

Winning the Man Booker prize in 2007 meant that Anne Enright got to meet lots of her readers. She wrote her new tale of an illicit affair for them, she tells ARMINTA WALLACE

WE MEET in the foyer of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire, which is buzzing with tourists, coffee-drinkers and sharp-suited young people hurrying to and from meetings. “I have a book out, you know,” Anne Enright confides, as we head for a quiet corner. “It’s disturbing my equilibrium.” We laugh. If she didn’t have a book out, we wouldn’t be here drinking Americanos in the sun.

The Forgotten Waltzis Enright's fifth novel, and the first since she won the Man Booker Prize for 2007's The Gathering. In it Enright returns to her favourite theme: the examination of domestic life to find the spaces – the heart-stopping black holes, sometimes – that lurk beneath its apparently harmless, seamless surface. Enright likes to take a chisel to the everyday. But The Forgotten Waltzis a very different book from The Gathering: full of light where the earlier book is full of darkness, consumed by life rather than death. The tale of an adulterous affair, it is in many ways a bit of a walk on the wild side.

And it’s full of sex. “No, it’s not,” Enright corrects. “It’s full of romance.” She takes a sip of coffee, then concedes. “Okay. It may be full of sex, but it’s not full of body parts. They seem to be able to do it without body parts – which is a great trick. I had great fun doing that. I had to write it all in, and then take it all out again, and then laugh. I did enjoy it, I have to say, there’s a bit of mischief there.”

What the book is really about is a grand passion. “It’s a hugely interesting subject, you know? And a great self-destructive folly, in a way. It’s throwing yourself off the cliff. I mean, the book is all about falling. Falling out of that love into a different kind of love. The falling economic situation. The falling snow. It’s all vertical.” But not the kind of fall where things rush headlong towards the ground? “No. Because no one knew where the bottom was. No one knew where it was gonna land. Not the economy, not the relationship. So it’s more like flying than falling; it’s more like floating than falling.”

The presence of snow adds to the feeling of suspended animation, of being out of the ordinary sphere of gravity-driven reality. As the first-person narrator, Gina, gingerly takes "one treacherous step after another" on the compacted ice, it also gives the book a startlingly contemporary feel. They were still selling cleats for the bottom of your shoes in Dunnes a couple of weeks ago, for goodness' sake. Enright laughs. She couldn't have foreseen, when she began to write The Forgotten Waltzon a white day in February 2009, that Irish winters would get snowier and snowier.

The story is also suspended between the Ireland of the boom and the Ireland of the recession. “It’s not a social satire,” Enright says. “It doesn’t really dig into the texture of people’s lives. There are a few designer labels in there. There’s, you know, floor covering. Terracotta into limestone. But I write a more elegiac thing, always. So it’s informed by now – but it’s not about now. If it’s getting too ‘abouty’, then it sort of dies as a book.”

This being Enright, the affair is somewhat unusual as well. For Gina Moynihan and her lover Seán Vallely, there are many of the sort of blissed-out afternoons in hotel rooms you would expect from an undercover romance. But there’s also an entirely unexpected component in the shape of Seán’s daughter, Evie.

The opening line of the book reads: “If it hadn’t been for the child then none of this might have happened.”

We’re used to the idea of the mistress, Enright says. But the child is a whole different ball game. “I really hope that people get the child thing. We’ll see.”

Whatever happens, at least Enright has got her first post-Booker novel under her belt – which isn’t as easy as one might suppose. Winning the prestigious literary prize was wonderful, she says, but it also claimed a large chunk of her writing life.

“It was enormously hard work, and it was hard work for a whole year. I think as an institution it has got much busier on the public relations front. Kingsley Amis could stand up and say, ‘Is this tax-free, ha ha ha’ and then go home and write a book. That is not how it works now.

“I’m reading the extract from Tina Fey’s memoir where she describes herself as ‘obedient’. I’m pretty obedient. I used to call it ‘convent bred’ – although the Louis nuns weren’t particularly big on obedience. But I do actually do what I’m told.

"Yes, of course I'll go to Hong Kong. And then all your problems become like rich people's problems. They're real to them, you know? But nobody's gonna have much sympathy for you. Lonely in Hong Kong. Jetlagged. Feeling stupid. So that's odd."

One thing she loved about that post-prize year was that she met readers all over the world. “I had never met readers before. I’ve met journalists, and I know the critics and I even know some of the academics, but the reader remains a kind of mysterious entity to me,” she says. “I actually think the Irish reader is key in all of this. The Irish reader is a quiet creature – as opposed to, say, the American reader. I love to see them doing all the book clubs and having opinions and just having a laugh. But they are the engine of this Irish literary flowering that we have now.”

Did this close encounter with readers have an impact on the new book? “Absolutely,” she says. “I absolutely wrote The Forgotten Waltz for the readers that I met. I thought, ‘They’ll enjoy this, now’. Oh, yes. Rather than for some sort of superego idea of the great novel.”

Yet she has an MA from the University of East Anglia (UEA), where the superego and the great novel is what it’s all about. In retrospect, did Enright learn anything at the university that has actually been of practical use in her writing career?

“It was quite a lonely year,” she says. “I wrote a huge book that was useless and I threw it in the bin. So I came home with nothing except maybe an idea, which I think is important, of what failure is. That it’s not a disaster, you know? I learned how to fail. Which you really need to do, because everything is gonna sit down on you. You have to hold the line and not give up – and that can take a year.

" The Gatheringsat down on me for a year. So it was a lesson in managing despair and the opposite of despair, which is grandiosity: this is the greatest thing, this is the worst thing.

“A lot of writing is about mood management. About keeping your emotions in a box under the bed. The little prattle of judgment; this is no good. I’m no good. Actually UEA, when I think about it, didn’t kill me.”

We laugh. “So that was what I learned.” It was at a time in her life, she adds, when she was young and fearless.

“We were all very pompous and egotistical. I was particularly unpleasant. I sat at the back of the room looking at Malcolm Bradbury like he was useless. I was the one who could write here – I just hadn’t done it yet. He, on the other hand, just sat there very benignly smoking his pipe and considering us, and was grand.

“The thing is, they don’t teach you anything except to do it. They will support and nurture, but it’s like a physical function, writing. Nobody else can do it for you. They can guide your steps, but they can’t walk for you or try and explain, ‘Heel first . . .’ ”

She recently had to write a lecture for – she pauses so I don’t miss the significance of the word – Cambridge.

“Terrifying. I wrote about being taught by Angela Carter at UEA. She read my manuscript and she said, ‘Well, all this is fine’. Which was about as much ‘teaching’ as I needed from her, really.”

But then, learning is a curious process. Much of it happens by osmosis, some happens by accident. Didn’t Enright study philosophy alongside English at Trinity College Dublin?

She groans. “I did, yeah. I never went to a philosophy lecture. I couldn’t figure it out. I was bright, but I couldn’t get any good marks in philosophy. And nobody would tell me what I was doing wrong.

“We had to wade through Locke, Berkeley and Hume and all that lot, and the philosophy of language and logic. Logic was all right. And then in third year we got to read Freud and Marx – she grins – the really dangerous stuff.”

She was deeply impressed by Freud’s stylish storytelling. “Psychoanalysis does inform my work a lot. I still would read Adam Phillips, say, or go back and have another look at Melanie Klein or someone like that. I find them very rich reading material. I haven’t done analysis or anything. God forbid – sitting there talking.”

On the other hand, there’s an analogy here with the way she works as a writer. She sits back, waits and allows the characters in her novels to reveal themselves to her.

"Me as therapist?" She considers. "Gina says in The Forgotten Waltzthat it's amazing how close you can get to somebody just by staying very still. And I think that's what writers do. That was nearly me talking there. Because the writing day is very short. It's always too short, but it's also a long time to be with two characters like that, or three characters, just waiting for them to show their hands. And they do."

Has the novel taken Enright over completely, or will she return to short stories? “Oddly enough, I just wrote a piece for Roddy Doyle for Fighting Words [a creative writing centre]. It’s a collector-y thing bound in calfskin, to raise money. I found it very easy to write for Roddy. You know, an awful lot of masculinity in literature is presented as problematic: somebody gets killed, somebody gets unpleasantly shagged. There’s a lot of unpleasant male writing around.

“But when I look around me – at husband, father, brother, son – there are not unpleasant men. So there’s something untrue, or fantastical, or whatever, about how masculinity is portrayed in fiction as a universal problem. But if you read Roddy’s men, you recognise the likeable men that you know.

“So I wrote a man for his book.”

There may be more stories on the way. "I have a thematic idea for some stories. I have a kind of shape for a bigger novel. I have a couple of scenes from a novel. Yes, the men thing is interesting. That's the thing I do, as a writer. You're looking for the falseness in fiction all the time. You're looking for the true story underneath. In The Forgotten Waltz, the true story is underneath the surface of the book. You get glimpses of it. That's the fun. Looking through Gina's prose to see the reality underneath. And then the reality surfaces at the end of the book. I hope."

THE ENRIGHT FILE:

* Born in Dublin on October 11th, 1962.

* Studied at Trinity College Dublin, in British Columbia, Canada and at the University of East Anglia.

* Worked as a TV producer and director at RTÉ for six years, four of them on the groundbreaking programme Nighthawks.

* Married to Martin Murphy, director of the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire. They have two children.

* Her debut collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, won the Rooney Prize for Literature in 1991. Her novel The Gatheringwon the Man Booker Prize in 2007.

The Forgotten Waltzis published by Jonathan Cape on April 28th