Claudia FitzHerbert

Selling sex up the river

Anne Enright is an Irish writer with a startling gift for domesticating the outlandish. In her last novel, about twins separated at birth, she explored the sadness at the heart of tales of freakish sameness. In her latest, based on the true story of a 19th-century Irish concubine, deranged appetites are passed off as endearing peccadilloes.

The novel opens like an arty French film, with some rhythmic coupling in a Paris flat. Eliza Lynch, an 18-year-old beauty with a chronic clothes habit and a pragmatically carnal relationship with her dressmaker, is intent on pleasuring Francisco Solano Lopez, a visiting South American with absurd manners and extravagant tastes. He is the heir-apparent to the dictatorship of Paraguay, she is a black-eyed hussy on the run from a prudent marriage. When she meets Lopez money ‘was running through her hands like water. She tried to catch it, hold it: clutched instead at his neck, or his throat, or his mouth’. Lopez, tiny and intense with wandering hands and eyes and a tyrannical appetite for farce, discerns a potential playmate with a ruthless courage to match his own. Within months of their first meeting the couple have crossed the Atlantic together and are sailing down the River Parana on the way to Paraguay.

The river winds through the rest of the book, which flashes back and forth between Eliza’s troubled journey and the gaudy show she puts on in the years that follow. On the journey out the suspended contempt of her fellow travellers and the watchful loyalty of her servants are a taste of the life which awaits her in the provincial backwater of Asuncion. But the ship is at least free of the respectable women whose obduracy will later define the limits of Eliza’s ascendancy as well as provide Enright with her finest set piece.

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