The Irish Booker Prize winner’s new novel explores the love lives of its various characters.
A mist, a perfume of ancient Celtic poetry echoes through the fabric of this novel about contemporary Irish lives. “People are different and they think differently,” says the first-person narrator, and she, Nell, signals the need for “translation”. Ending the first section of the novel is Nell’s poet-grandfather’s translation of an 18th-century anonymous love poem: “Lay your dark head upon my breast/ your honey mouth with scent of thyme.
Birds dominate the imagery of the novel itself, which concludes with the thought that when everything else has disappeared into landfill, a bird “will perch on top of the lot of it and sing”.The Wren, The Wren , lies in the breezy way it moves in and out of its different textures – now sixth-century poetry, now the fractured one-word thoughts of a modern woman, now a form of Joycean stream of consciousness, now a blunt detail of sexual encounter with a stranger, now a tender moment of love, now a vivid description of a rural scene, now a series of incompetent text messages. At all times, the reader feels informed, enclosed in the narrative, eager for the next development.
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