ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a Booker prize winning novel from Ireland, Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007), to contend that fiction formally articulates Ireland’s controversial emergence as the posterchild of booming economic progress in the period when the country was known as the “Celtic Tiger”. Focusing on siblings Veronica and Liam, the former an upwardly mobile lifestyle columnist, and the latter an alcoholic hospital porter, the novel illuminates the contradictions of the Celtic Tiger economy. The stark class and locational differences between brother and sister coupled with Veronica’s knowledge of Liam’s childhood sexual abuse sends her into psychosomatic depression. Veronica’s testimonial comprising made-up and suppressed facts and half-formed feelings constitutes a new kind of narrative voice in Irish fiction, that of the alienated global subject. Burdened with the historical knowledge of abuse and fragmented by the impact of the Celtic Tiger, The Gathering articulates a uniquely Irish perception of neoliberal globalization that is, at the same time, indicative of similar crises elsewhere.
