Death makes convention irrelevant. The complexity of grief makes everything a possibility, except of course for the resurrection of the dead. This story of Enright is delivered through the surreal tonality of the left behind-and- lost protagonist Catherine.
Catherine has buried her mother and spends a working weekend in the company of her boss, a known philanderer. Yet her seemingly incongruous decision to consummate her ‘attraction’ to this male is made ‘askew’ to both the reader and eventually the protagonist. This is rendered through an oblique narrative which ultimately offers up a meeting and symbolic image which ‘quenches ‘ out her reckless, self-destructive choice and allows Catherine a power and choice that her mother’s terminal illness had obliterated. Catherine’s fragmentation or in NLP terms her incongruity, is altered through a strange happening that instils congruence and catharsis.
‘ Oozing over the concrete ball was a dripping,black, velvet swarm. Clumps of bees fell from the jagged edges, or crawled back up the gatepost to rejoin the mass…The bees were bristly and soft, and their tiny legs clung to her fingertips as she shook them back into the mess of black wings. She watched them until she could not tell them apart. Then she started to cry. ‘
Catherine moves the bees safely away from their elected resting place, completing an action literally that she had yearned to undertake metaphorically with her mother’s cancer. Catherine’s spontaneous and ‘natural’ decision to rehome the bees is tender and without fear. She is courageous and empowered. She can heal a potentially dangerous event through her intervention. Enright has the knowingness here to ‘find’ the image to convey the hopeless impotency of grief and the ways we may attempt to reedit and revisit the unthinkability of death. I was deeply impressed by the apt surreality of this image and the visceral sensitivities represented. Unlike some of the stories in this collection which seemed too idiosyncratic and singular to be intimate, this affected me powerfully and with a resonance that remains.