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Around the World in Books / Ireland
They Saved Dublin Prostitutes By Bribing The Madams With Chocolates — But At What Cost?
A Man Booker Prize–winning novel explores how the events of a century ago affect a modern Irish family
This is the 11th post in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books from 30 countries in the first 30 days of March. Tomorrow: Japan
In the 1920s a group of lay Catholics tried to save Dublin prostitutes by removing them from brothels after buying off the madams with Milk Tray chocolates or other bribes. Anne Enright builds on this historical episode in her artful Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Gathering (Grove, 2007), which imagines how the effort might have affected a young woman and her descendants.
Enright’s narrator is 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty, a contemporary Irish mother of two who has enough wit and ironic detachment from her life to view it in quotation marks: “I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of people did. This is what I had…
