“Actress” by Anne Enright
This is a very good novel; it is in effect two life stories, told simultaneously, as they interlink. It again shows Anne Enright, one of Ireland’s leading authors to be supremely writing at her prime.
The Actress of the title is the narrator, Norah’s mother, a famous screen and stage performer who becomes known as Katherine O’Dell. She is however not the Irish lass she purports to be, originating in a London suburb, her parents both stage performers, resulting in her career starting at an early age. She eventually rises quickly and becomes a Hollywood star, her life managed and manipulated by the industry even into an arranged wedding to a fellow star.
Her return to Ireland is after the glitz has started to wain, her marriage is over, and she has a baby daughter, and it is the parentage of Norah that imbibes this novel with the second string of it’s bow, as Norah never knows who her father might be, and we read about her life, and eventual happy settled existence as she decides to tell us her reader her mother’s life story but enthusing it with her own, it’s ups and downs, her loving childhood, less settled early adulthood, and into a strong life’s partnership to her husband to whom the story is actually being recounted.
Norah’s life has interests in it’s own right, they compliment those of her mother’s and it is characters from stage and screen who dominate their story; her mother’s acquaintances filtering into her life and even having quite radical ramifications on Norah. Throughout the book we learn about each of them, but we know that Katherine commits a crime, goes mad, and how all these pressures affect the two women, and their immediate households. As we witness this, all set in great time periods, particularly those within Dublin, we are awarded with an array of characters, a few good, many very troubled individuals. Yet as the book draws to its conclusion these lives merge, each strand of the storyline coming together to leave this reader very satisfied and admiring of Anne Enright’s narrative powers. Already an award winning author, this new novel deserves to receive the plaudits it has been honoured with. Certainly one I will recommend when asked to local book clubs.
