In the centre of Berlin, there is a large bare room with a hole in the roof to let the light in. In the middle of that room there is a statue of a grieving mother holding her dead son. This modern pietà, created by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz – who lost her son in the first World War – is, in its implacable stillness, an almost overwhelming encounter with loss.
If the mother were to speak, the words that might come to her mouth could be those of Lady Gregory in The Journey to Galway, the opening story of Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short stories, The News from Dublin. In this beautifully paced story, the reader follows Lady Gregory on her way to inform her daughter-in-law that her husband has died in combat.
WB Yeats would immortalise the untimely death of Robert Gregory in his poem An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, but Tóibín’s story focuses on the harrowing grief of intimate loss. Losses of different kinds – of status, of place, of language, of certainty – pattern the collection. Tóibín’s narrators are often called upon to improvise, to be resourceful, to practise various forms of venality, just to keep on living in a world that is not catered to their means.
In A Sum of Money, Dan uses his father’s innocent skill in opening locks to steal money from the lockers of other boys in his boarding school. He is acutely conscious of his fellow boarders’ material ease and their gossipy knowledge of his own straitened circumstances. The filched pounds and shillings are part of a desperate attempt to bluff his way into an appearance of privilege that is unfailingly precarious.
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In the title story, The News from Dublin, the schoolteacher Maurice goes to Dublin to see a government minister who, he hopes, might be able to procure the new miracle drug – streptomycin – in time to save his ailing brother, Stephen, from death by tuberculosis. Maurice is secretary of the local Fianna Fáil cumann in his hometown and his father had been interned with the minister in Frongoch prison camp, but his trip to the Dáil brings him face to face with the sober calculations of politics.
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Even the arresting sight of a pre-eminently self-possessed Éamon de Valera in the Dáil chamber cannot compensate for Maurice’s growing sense of powerlessness. Returning to Enniscorthy, he senses his own loss of face converging with his brother’s loss of possibility, “feeling with each step he took that he was leaving a ghost trailing behind him, hovering in the darkening air, a solitary figure asking him if there was any news, if there was any hope”.
The stories range over territories familiar to Tóibín’s readers: Wexford, Catalonia, Argentina, the US. The audience benefits from his forensic alertness to the historical detail of these places and his sensitivity to changing circumstances. Five Bridges brings the reader into the world of Paul, an illegal Irish immigrant in the US who had always thought of going back to Ireland and had never quite got around to it. He is the father of a child, Geraldine, through a relationship with an American woman and, though estranged from the child’s mother, he belatedly builds a relationship with Geraldine.
As the anti-migrant mood darkens and the Ice dragnet tightens, Paul realises it is time to get out, which means his daughter will grow older in an America he will never see again. Tóibín is particularly deft at constructing relationships inhabited by a kind of hesitant tenderness that never gives way to schmaltz. Paul can often appear to be the child in the relationship with his daughter, but they both have a knowingness about their respective vulnerabilities that keeps the palaver of easy sentiment at bay.
One of the most challenging stories is A Free Man, which follows the spectral afterlife in Barcelona of Joe, a convicted sex offender, after his release from an Irish prison. Joe is primarily preoccupied with the practical steps necessary to putting together a new life. Gradually, we are offered glimpses into his earlier life, his time in the seminary, his decision to leave it, his discovery of his sexuality, the period leading up to his trial and conviction, and his time in prison with other offenders. Tóibín excels in capturing Joe’s disconcerting moral blankness, where at some deep level that matters, he cannot properly hold himself to account for the enormous harm he has caused.
The Catalan Girls, the final story, traces the lives of three sisters – Núria, Conxita and Montse – who are brought at a relatively young age by their widowed mother from Franco-era Catalonia to Argentina. Running to almost 100 pages, it is similar to A Long Winter, originally published in Tóibín’s short story collection Mothers and Sons (2006) and separately last year as a novella. It also has elements of the folk tale, with Montse as a much put-upon Cinderella and Núria as the wickedly ambitious sister. Tracing the faultlines of division and belonging and the scrambled identities of languages, The Catalan Girls is a prolonged meditation on the elusiveness of the idea of home.
The News from Dublin is the work of a writer who has once again demonstrated a complete command of his craft.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
