New Booker Prize winner Anne Enright's amazing attack on Gerry and Kate McCann
Booker Prize winner Anne Enright today ran into controversy after writing an extraordinary article describing how much she disliked Gerry and Kate McCann.
The piece, which was published in the London Review of Books before the Irish novelist won the 2007 award for The Gathering, is a provocative 2,000-word analysis of her own reactions to the plight of the McCanns.
She writes how at one stage her family suspected that the McCanns were responsible for missing Madeleine's death, and tells how she disliked the McCanns "earlier than most people" - particularly Gerry.
Enright, who has two children aged four and seven, also talks about the "narcissism" of Kate McCann and compares remarks they have made to exchanges between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
In the article, published a fortnight ago, Enright wrote: "In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns 'did it' swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone."
Describing disliking the McCanns as "an international sport," she wrote: "I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I'm not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone.
"In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that 'she does not cry'."
While most of the animosity against the McCanns was centred on "Madeleine's beautiful mother", she said she reacted worse to Gerry and the way he speaks.
"I find Gerry McCann's need to ' influence the investigation' more provoking than her flat sadness, or the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcissism that flecks her public appearances.
"I have never objected to good-looking women. My personal jury is out on the issue of narcissism in general; her daughter's strong relationship with the camera lens causes us a number of emotions, but the last of them is always sorrow and pain."
She added: "The sad fact is that this man cannot speak properly about what is happening to himself and his wife, and about what he wants. The language he uses is more appropriate to a corporate executive than to a desperate father. This may be just the way he is made. This may be all he has of himself to give the world, just now.
"But we are all used to the idea of corporations lying to us, one way or another - it's part of our mass paranoia, as indeed are the couple we see on the screen. No wonder, I think, they will not speak about that night.
"Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns."
Family is the subject of Enright's novel which took the £50,000 prize at the Guildhall ceremony last night.
She thanked her parents "for everything" and her siblings "for never faltering" as well as her husband, Martin Murphy, a theatre director, whom she described as the love of her life.
"I think my life has changed but I don't know in what way, so for the moment I'm really enjoying it," she said.
But she insisted her bleak tale of a family who gather after one of the siblings kills himself is not autobiographical. "I know the difference between myself and my fictions."
Her victory came as a surprise to the bookmakers who had expected either Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach or the heavily tipped Mr Pip by New Zealander Lloyd Jones to take the prize.
Enright, who turned 45 last week, was a rank outsider. The novel is the fourth in a writing career which has followed a stint as a producer on an Irish TV chat show, which precipitated a breakdown.
She said: "We were live three nights a week. We drank our heads off (afterwards). It was inevitable that it should crash and burn at some stage. But some of the people I made friends with are friends for life."
source: dailymail.co.uk
A fairly controversial piece I think, has she or anyone else the right to play judge and jury ? I really feel to make such outspoken remarks if you haven't met the family and know ALL the facts is really out of order!
