A dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara: Actress, by Anne Enright, reviewed

Actress is the novel Anne Enright has been rehearsing since her first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin (1991). It is a perfect jewel of a book, a dark emerald set in the Irish laureate’s fictional tiara, alongside her Man Booker Prize winner The Gathering (2007) and The Green Road (2015). Its brilliance is complex and multifaceted, but completely lucid. Like its predecessors, it is a portrait of a matriarch.

Norah, the novelist daughter of an invented Irish theatre legend, Katherine O’Dell, sets out to tell the story of her mother’s life as she approaches her own 59th birthday. She is acutely aware that she is about to have one birthday more than the actress managed: ‘I would spin beyond her, out into unchartered space. I was about to become older than my own mother.’

No one is named Norah accidently in a novel set in Dublin. Norah Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife and muse, is embedded forever in the literary life of Dublin and Dubliners.