Selling sex up the river
Claudia FitzHerbert
THE PLEASURE OF ELIZA LYNCH by Anne Enright Cape, £12.99, pp. 229, ISBN 0224062697 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
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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. This is the banquet picnic at which Eliza presides in a lace dress which 'crawled about her neck and crept down her hands, to be caught in a sort of glittering mitten by the rings she wore'. When the women blank their hostess while eying up her food, Eliza responds by having precious plates of unheard of delicacies thrown into the river.
Enright uses a fractured time-scheme to keep us guessing about the past as well as the future. In the beginning Eliza's feelings for her frog prince are a cocktail of pregnant need and concubine greed and we watch her play her cards accordingly. Only much later in the novel, just when we might have begun to tire of the seeming unreachability of La Concubina Irlandesa, which is presented entirely in terms of her matchless wealth, do we understand the true nature of her capitulation on the journey out.
After the death of his father Lopez embarks on a series of disastrous wars, and La Lincha turns camp-follower. She bashes away on the piano — its carriage costs lives — while Lopez takes out traitors with his gun — 'he needed to do it himself these days, like a morning expectoration or a fart'. Sons are born, a daughter dies, and we see the country fall apart through the compromised, unforgiving eyes of a Scots doctor escaped from Greeneland.
Some historical novels — the unsuccessful majority perhaps — leave the reader idly wondering about the factual accuracy of the author's account of this time or that place. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch does not allow for any such pedestrian speculation. You both know that it is entirely invented — Enright's eye and ear are not for the stuff of other men's records — and feel that it is true in the way that only made-up stories can be. Eliza Lynch stands for all the women in history who have sold sex and hoarded gold and lost their hearts along the way. It is an ancient fable: Enright makes it fresh as paint.
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