Anne Enright's brutally honest assessment of the McCanns was an articulate capture of public opinion, writes Sarah Caden


At a lunch recently, a friend turned to the woman next to her and asked what she thought about the McCanns. It was mid-September, the week after Kate and then Gerry McCann had been made "arguidos" in the case of their missing daughter, Madeleine, and everyone had a theory.

Not this woman, or, if she had, she was keeping it to herself. She and her husband had agreed, she told my friend, that they thought all the talk and speculation about the McCanns was disgusting and they weren't talking about it anymore.

My friend was dumbstruck, a bit put out at being told off and more than a bit embarrassed at being part of the disgusting brigade. She had not intended to seem gossiping about the McCanns, nor to seem to reduce their situation to trivial, watercooler conversation. But it was what everyone was talking about that week and everyone had a theory.

It was absolutely normal for her to imagine this acquaintance had one too, in the brief period before we became ashamed of ourselves, the McCanns became untouchables, the Portuguese police the villains and little Madeleine somewhat lost in our shame at our brief leaping to judgement of her parents.

It was during that brief spate of speculation, rumour and, let's face it, a sort of sick gossip, that Anne Enright wrote about the McCanns for the London Review of Books. Anne Enright, you may need reminding, is the Irish author who on Tuesday night snatched the Booker Prize from the favourite, Ian McEwan.

By Thursday, however, she was better known for what was being called an "amazing attack" on Kate and Gerry McCann and, by Friday, Enright was no longer explaining delight in her literary victory, but expressing deep regret over her other LRB essay.

She stopped short of an apology, and her regret was restricted to the timing of the piece, but then, apology was not required of Enright, no matter how some newspapers' filleting of her essay attempted to force her into one.

With courage and intelligence, Anne Enright's 2,000-word Diary: Disliking the McCanns put on paper what thousands of others had thought and talked about through the summer and early autumn.

The only difference is that some of us would rather deny our darker and more shameful thoughts now, while the right thing for Anne Enright to do is to stand by her articulate admissions.

Before going into what Anne Enright wrote about the McCann case, it should be pointed out that she was more critical of herself and her behaviour than she was of them and what they might have done.

Certainly, Enright says she disliked them "earlier than most people" but immediately adds that she's not proud of this. She tells stories against herself and her own parenting and in conclusion to her criticism of the McCanns, in a stand alone sentence says, "Then I go to bed and wake up the next morning, human again, liking the McCanns".

Instead of "venomous", as her writing was described last week, Enright's opinions are blunt and bold and lay bare what most would prefer our minds and behaviour haven't run to since Madeleine McCann disappeared five months ago.

"The move from unease, through rumour, to mass murder took no time flat," wrote Anne Enright in her essay.

"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 McCann's holiday apartment down the road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles)."

In that paragraph fragment, Enright sums up the shamefully gossipy quality of what happened in early September, when the McCanns became official suspects in their daughter's disappearance. Once the Portuguese police gave permission by pointing the finger at the three-year-old's parents, there came a torrent of rumour and speculation.

Anne Enright's husband didn't start the wife-swapping rumour, he just passed it on, the casual manner of his relating it being typical of the way in which many of us talked about suggestions the McCann children had been sedated, that Kate was at her wits' end with three small kids, that neighbours had regularly heard her lose her temper.

And the author wasn't the only one speculating about the logistics of disposing of a small child's body in a holiday resort.

Still, some will choose to be shocked at how Enright addresses this less than admirable train of thought. In her essay, she goes on to relate a conversation with her father, when it emerged that Madeleine's DNA had been found in the hire car her parents acquired 25 days after her disappearance.

Her father, apparently, observed that Enright's own four-year-old child was too big to fit in a spare-tyre well, as the McCanns were supposed to have hidden Madeleine.

Enright answered that Madeleine was "only a slip of a thing" and then continues, "I did not say that the body might have been made more pliable by decomposition. And I had to physically resist the urge to go out to my own car and open the boot to check (get in there now, sweetheart, and curl up into a ball)."

Perhaps it is the light touch of her description of this conversation, these thoughts, that offends as much as what Enright describes. It would be easy to read her speculation as off-hand, careless, cold, but it is anything but. What Enright conveys is the preoccupation -- even obsession -- we have built up around the McCanns and the casual way in which we have speculated on what happened to their girl.

We find it awful to contemplate, of course, but that has not stopped us dissecting, discussing and even disapproving of them.

This whole case has stirred some of the less admirable aspects of human nature and Anne Enright has had the courage to own up to them. And been slapped down for it.

In one English newspaper during the week, Trish Cameron, a sister of Gerry McCann, spoke out against the Booker Prize-winning Irish author.

Cameron said she "could not believe" anyone would make such comments, speculated that Enright was publicity seeking with her essay and revealed either that she has been spectacularly sheltered from recent months' mountains of speculation, or has chosen not to engage with them.

"It's such a surprising thing to say," says Cameron of Enright's essay, "bearing in mind she does not even know Kate and Gerry." Clearly, she is not aware that knowing Kate and Gerry is not necessary in order to draw conclusions or concoct theories on their guilt and innocence.

None of us know them, but in a bizarre way we feel we do and feel we can make judgements, based only on the massive extent to which they exposed themselves to the media, in the hope, they would say, of retrieving their child.

When she says she disliked the McCanns "earlier than most", Enright was judging them on their performance on television. We all saw a lot of them and we all drew conclusions, let's not pretend otherwise.

She talks about how many homed in on little irritations to avoid facing the big ones, the fact Kate continued to go jogging while Madeleine was missing, her clutching of the Cuddle Cat (admit it, I don't have to explain to you what that is), her wearing of the lost little girl's ribbons in her hair, what Enright calls her "wounded narcissism".

Yet while many have focused on the attractive Kate as vaguely distrustful, Enright felt uncomfortable with Gerry. She didn't like his use of language, lay awake at night engaged in authorly puzzling over his use of active and passive verbs, comparing his comments to Lady Macbeth.

"The focus of my 'dislike'," she says, and note the self-aware inverted commas, "is the language that Gerry McCann uses; his talk of 'information technology' and 'control', and his need to 'look forward'."

As a writer, Enright became concerned with the hidden meaning of the McCann's language, though, to be fair to Gerry McCann, his stiff speaking style may come from years of work as a doctor, a profession known for its ability to distance and confuse people with obtuse talk.

But it has been a long time since things have been fair or measured or objective when it came to the McCanns.

While the fuss struck up around Anne Enright's writing last week, Channel 4 aired a Dispatches documentary called, "Searching for Madeleine".

Five crime experts were sent to Praia da Luz in Portugal, to comb over the location of Madeleine McCann's disappearance and bring their expertise to a case Portuguese police seem unable to conclude.

The five, among them the police officer who had overseen the Soham murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, brought a wealth of forensic knowledge and experience to the situation and while they drew no definite conclusions, they made one interesting point.

Had Madeleine McCann gone missing in the UK -- aside from the initial hunt being conducted more comprehensively and competently -- the first focus of the investigation would have been her family, her parents, those closest to and with greatest access to the child.

Then, once they had been ruled out, the net would spread further afield, to local offenders and then to an organised gang of abductors.

What happened in the case of Madeleine McCann was that the other, the faceless intruder, the bogeyman, was the suspect from the start. Kate and Gerry McCann were, then, at first the distraught, and devastating to observe, parents.

Then they were in our faces all the time, lingering, allowing us to pass comment on her fading-away figure, his brusque manner, the quality of their parenting. And then, eventually, they became "arguidos", official suspects not only of the Portuguese police, but of everyone. She didn't get upset enough, he was still blogging while she was being interrogated, they were more shirty than sympathetic after a while.

None of which means they did anything to their daughter and, it should be observed, the investigating police never said they murdered Madeleine, only that they believe something awful occurred in that holiday apartment.

There is a difference, and if that is the case and the police had focused on that avenue of enquiry from the outset and found it to be the case, they would not now be the focus of international attention and opinion.

Their story would have been a short and sad news item, not something about which everyone feels a voyeuristic sense of ownership.

"Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic," wrote Enright, "it keeps our children safe."

And she is so right. If the McCanns were involved in Madeleine's disappearance, accidentally or not, it is horrible to contemplate. It is near-impossible for any of us to imagine what it must be to harm a child, any child, particularly your own child. But it can happen.

Anne Enright herself tells a story against herself in her essay, of how she once tore up and flung on the floor a croissant when her small son would not give her a bite of it. Minor, but mindlessly angry all the same and out of control and very, very honest.

However, having a hand in your child's death is another thing. It is beyond horrible, but somehow, it is also less scary than having them stalked and abducted as Madeleine may have been.

If Madeleine died at Kate or Gerry McCann's hand, then it can be blamed on them, specifically, and we can convince ourselves it would never happen to us. If it was the bogeyman, then we must accept that danger lurks everywhere and it could happen to any of us, at any time. We would live in fear, rather than judgement of the McCanns.

In the last months, every one of us, even if only on and off, have sat in judgement of Kate and Gerry McCann. Maybe only for leaving their children alone that night, maybe for being too much in the media and maybe, for many, for having some role in Madeleine's disappearance.

It's been ugly and after the initial rush of rumour that followed their becoming official suspects, we have felt rightly ashamed of ourselves.

That we cannot admit it or allow Anne Enright, in the most intelligent terms, admit to it for us, however, is also a shame. As much of a shame as the fact that the person who has mattered least and has truly disappeared in recent months, is Madeleine McCann.