Anne Enright: 'Disliking the McCanns'
Extracts from the “Diary” piece published in London Review of Books
The Diary piece was headed “Disliking the McCanns” but it is more about the public obsessiveness and her own obsessiveness with the McCanns' and this enthralling tragic story.
She writes: “If someone else is found to have taken Madeleine McCann – as may well be the case – it will show that the ordinary life of an ordinary family cannot survive the suspicious scrutiny of millions”.
She is disbelieving over an unverified statement by Kate McCann, during her interrogation by Portuguese police that she had had contact with six dead patients while going on holiday (this was by way, apparently, of an explanation why a cadaver dog had picked up the scent of death on her (Kate McCann's) clothes. A part time GP would be unlikely to have had contact with so many dead people in such a short time (a week). But then the claim is “unverified”, as is most of the speculation about the McCanns.
Anne Enright writes: our obsession with the story “makes harridans of us all. The move from unease, through rumour, to mass murder took no time flat. During the white heat of media allegations against Madeleine's parents, my husband came up the stairs to say that they'd all been wife-swapping – that was why the other diners corroborated the McCanns' account of the evening. This, while I was busy measuring the distance from the McCanns' holiday apartment down the road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles). I said they couldn't have been wife-swapping, because one of the wives had brought her mother along”.
She went through several of the other fanciful scenarios canvassed about the disappearance of Madeline McCann. She 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”.
And she continued: “Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic. It keeps our children safe. Disliking the McCanns is an international sport. You might think the comments on the internet are filled with hatred, but hate pulls the object close; what I see instead is dislike – an uneasy, unsettled, relentlessly petty emotion. It is not that we blame them – if they can be judged, then they can also be forgiven. No, we just dislike them for whatever it is that nags at us. We do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or holding hands on the way into Mass. 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 say to go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry.'”
Anne Enright said most of the animosity against the McCanns centers on Madeline's “beautiful mother”. But it is the langue of Gerry McCann she finds disquieting. his talk of ‘information technology' and ‘control', his need to ‘look forward'”. But concludes: “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”.