The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright review – a supple, spellbinding scrutiny of familial relationships

Early on in Anne Enright’s spellbinding new novel, Nell, a young woman in Dublin, is thinking about the mystery of human separateness. She calls it “the empty air which exists between people” and concludes that “it might be crossed by emotion, but it might not.” This could also be a summary of the problem of writing itself: it may or may not transport itself across the empty space between author and reader.

The Wren, the Wren is, like so much of Enright’s work, a supple scrutiny of familial relationships – in this case the fraught love between Nell and her mother, Carmel. But it is also a meditation on this other way of connecting – or failing to connect – through language.

A key word in the novel is “translation”. Nell, when we first meet her, is convinced that love is what happens to two people who are instinctive and native speakers of the same emotional and psychological language. When she is 22 and just out of Trinity College Dublin, she falls madly for a big country boy, Felim: “There was no gap, no need for translation. I felt understood, merged. And this feeling was euphoric.” Enright’s design, though, is to suggest that there is always a need for translation – between lovers, between parent and child, between writer and reader.

The book’s boldness is that it is itself richly seasoned with translations. They are supposedly the work of Carmel’s dead father, the rustic Irish poet Phil McDaragh. Enright intersperses prose with poetry – both Phil’s own verses and his versions of some of the most potent Irish-language verses, including Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna’s wonderfully melancholy The Yellow Bittern and the sixth-century Scribe’s Lament, which is itself about the very act of writing: “I’ve a crick in my paw from scribbling/ My pen scuttles across the page.” Reading these translations we are aware of the distance they have to travel, the many layers of invention and interpretation between the original poets, Enright herself and her fictional Phil.

But this is not a clever postmodern exercise. The poems are a test of connection. They are the fragile craft in which familial emotion has to travel somehow across the empty spaces left by abandonment and betrayal. Nell reads her grandfather’s poems for comfort and solace: “When things were bad, I would curl up with Phil and sweeten the hurt.” Yet Phil is also the source of the hurt. Having written glorious love poems for his wife, he left her and her two young daughters, one of whom was Carmel, and went off to teach at a college in the US and marry what Nell calls the American Wife.

He left Carmel the novel’s title poem, in which she is imagined as the eponymous little bird, held in his hand as “a panic/of feathered air” and then released into the “far away sky”. Is the poem a vessel full of emotional truth or a cynical self-justification for desertion?

For Carmel, Phil is a presence that looms all the more inescapably for his absence: “her father was bigger than the world and a lot less wonderful. He was vast, like a wall.”

But for Nell, a generation further on and encountering Phil through his written words and an old TV interview she replays online, the connection to her grandfather feels like “more than a strand of DNA, it is a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.” Is Phil a prison wall or a living cord that can help you escape the confines of sorrow? That he is the first for Carmel and the second for Nell means that the very figure that unites them – the one man they really share in their lives – is also the one that makes them so different.

Phil’s treachery continues to hover over the emotional lives of his daughter and granddaughter. The novel is full of leaving. Relationships are severed. Nell is dumped by the dreadful Felim. Carmel, who has purposefully had her daughter on her own to avoid the risk of her own mother’s fate, picks up and then ruthlessly discards a man when he becomes too needy. But, in the end, they both must find a way to love each other that acknowledges the impossibility of filling all that empty air.

Enright’s brilliance is that she doesn’t just write about all this – she allows us to experience it. The book contains the empty spaces of discontinuities of perspective and style. A pattern is set up of alternating chapters, first Nell’s first-person ruminations and then Carmel seen through more distanced third-person narratives. But this pattern is also broken by the poems and translations, by a single episode of childhood memoir from Phil, by a letter from the American Wife to Nell. The imagery of the poems (most of it involving birds) seeps into the prose and vice versa.

In other hands, the effect of this deliberately fragmentary structure might be frustrating or confusing. But Enright is a bravura stylist who scores the various voices with a delicate ear for the different intonations of loss and longing. All the vividness of characterisation that her readers have come to expect is here, and so is the wry, almost surreal wit with which she has always laced her acute observations of human folly. She emerges, even as a ventriloquist who casts her voice through Phil, as a highly adept poet.

It is with these superb skills that Enright answers the question that her book poses. She holds us as readers at a careful distance. But only so that we can feel how language, when it is sufficiently well arrayed, can cross the spaces between the page and the heart and, as Enright’s always does, hit home.

• The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape on 31 August (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply