I first walked on the bare rocks of the Burren on the West Coast of Ireland before I knew I had Irish heritage and the tug of that landscape has been more intense than any other. Some of the most powerful scenes in The Green Road, by Irish author Anne Enright, are set in and around the Burren and they made the book poignant for me; stirring longings for a windswept place I can’t claim to understand.

The green road is an unpaved track that crosses the uplands of the Burren—taking in the views from the Cliffs of Moher in the south to the Twelve Bens and Maumturk mountains in the north.

Enright rented a holiday cottage in the Burren in 2012.

‘Every day, after working on my novel,’ she wrote in The Guardian in May 2015, ‘I walked up the green road, the edge of the world, the last place before America. I spent long summers looking out over the Atlantic as a child, so I knew where I was.’

Knowing where you are in a landscape or place and knowing where you are in a family are important threads in The Green Road, a novel in two parts, entitled ‘Leaving’ and ‘Coming Home’.

We get the first hint of who might ‘leave’ on New Year’s Day in 1980 when a priest calls in and sits in the front room of Pat and Rosaleen Madigan’s home in Ardeevin. It’s through the eyes of their youngest daughter Hanna that we see ‘the priest’s hair had the mark of the comb in it, as thought it was still wet, and his coat, lying under the stairs, was very black and soft’.

The visit signals trouble. By Easter, Hanna’s brother Dan announces he is going to be a priest. Rosaleen is overwhelmed by her son’s news and takes the ‘horizontal solution’—refusing to leave her bedroom for some time. Readers learn in the following pages that she is a volatile and somewhat ambivalent parent.

We next meet the Madigan children as adults: Dan as a gay (and not ordained) man in New York, Emmet when he’s doing aid work in Mali, Constance when she is having scans at a clinic in Limerick and Hanna as a new mother.

We next meet Rosaleen in 2005 when she is long widowed and has decided to sell the family home. This galvanises Dan, Emmet and Hanna to return home (Constance never left the area) for Christmas. The book builds to a crescendo from here as we learn more of who these four adult children are to each other and to their mother.

Rosaleen leaves the Christmas gathering and gets lost on the Burren. ‘The Green Road’ chapter, where she is ‘out on the dark road under a deep sky’ and her children are beginning to search for her, is further evidence (as if any of us needed it) that Enright is one of the finest writers alive today.

This blog post is already twice the length I’m aiming to write during Microlit month. So, pick up Enright’s profound book and discover exactly how it plumbs the powerful currents of family feeling for yourself.

The Green Road
Anne Enright
Random House $32.99

PS: July is Microlit month over at Spineless Wonders Publishing #‎MicrolitMonth and I’m traveling—so all my posts this month are supposed to be short and sweet (250 words max) … except when it’s easier for me to write more!