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Sat 05 May 2007Tracking back to the truthFictionIn one of her previous novels, What Are You Like? (2000), Anne Enright used the story of Irish twins, brought up apart from each other, to illuminate the ironies and tensions always present within blood relationships.It's something of a surprise that she returns to similar territory in her latest novel, The Gathering, particularly after the vast historical and geographical stretch of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), with its recreation of 19th-century Paraguay. Might not this retreat to the subject of the Irish dysfunctional family be a backward step, one that signals a misfit between the capaciousness and dynamism of her mordant prose, and the familiarity, the ordinariness, of her subject?