The Fantasy Family, an essay on Ann Enright's novel 'The Gathering'

A consideration of narrative structure and political opportunism in the work of Anne Enright, who won the Booker Prize in 2007 with the novel The Gathering, a work of fiction whose plot eventually turns on a question of child molestation and which frequently brings together a very 'literary' sense of how novels should proceed (symbolism, flashbacks, lexical games) with an awareness of the public interest in this particular crime. The question the article seeks to raise is how we can distinguish mere contrivance from real achievement.