What makes Toibin tick?
Reading Colm Toibin, Edited by Paul Delaney (The Liffey Press, €18.95)
Paul Delaney considers this "a noticeable gap" in contemporary criticism, which he feels this collection of views will begin to fill. To this end, the editor (himself an academic) has recruited 10 other academics (eight of them based in Ireland) and a journalist to close the gap.
Some six of the essays gathered here were first delivered as papers to a conference on Toibin held at Trinity College in Dublin just over a year ago. Another four were commissioned for this book and the the volume is rounded out by an edited public interview with Toibin by his erstwhile colleague, Fintan O'Toole.
A kind of critical consensus begins to emerge early on in the collection, most notably in Roy Foster's contribution. Foster notices that Toibin's sense of history underwent an interesting and compelling change while the future novelist was a student of History and English at UCD in the early Seventies. Toibin had been brought up in Enniscorthy, where his father had been a school-teacher, a local historian and a Fianna Fail loyalist.
From his father and other sources Toibin had inherited the standard version of Irish nationalist history -- the 700 years of brutal oppression, the glorious moral victories of the repeatedly unsuccessful attempts at resistance,the serial martyrdoms, the dispossessions, the exiles, the whole panorama of futility.
According to Toibin himself, he was in his 20s before he learnt of the appalling massacre of innocent Protestants at Scullabogue in 1798 and the impact of that knowledge and the continuing republican atrocities during the so-called Troubles soon brought him to the realisation that purity of motive is not to be attributed to any side in a conflict. To be is, necessarily, to be guilty. Toibin went on to document this insight in his first book, Walking Along the Border (1987). One of the regrettable absences from Reading Colm Toibin is a detailed consideration of his early career as a journalist, from his beginnings as a theatre reviewer to his editorship of Magill magazine. For it was in these years that Toibin discovered and mapped out the territories that his subsequent fictional writings would explore in greater detail.
The Heather Blazing for example (his second novel, 1992) conjoins his revisionist take on Irish history with his critique of the conservative judiciary of pre-boom Ireland. The Master (his most recent novel, 2004) explores the human cost, in misery and loneliness, of the creative life by focusing on part of the deeply ambiguous life and literary career of Henry James.
All the essays collected here do Toibin the honour of taking him seriously, of discerning in his work a deep and interrogative engagement with contemporary Ireland, even when the writings are set in Spain or Argentina.
Among the most perceptive of the contributions is an analysis of Toibin's recent short story collection, Mothers and Sons (2006), by Anne Fogarty in which she uncovers the various strategic moves that Toibin makes in his short fictions to disrupt the reader's equanimity and bring her/him to uncomfortable places that we should, that we must know about.
Gerry Dukes is a writer and critic
- Gerry Dukes
