THERE were times during my reading of Colm Toibin's fascinating new novel when I wasn't at all sure where it was going. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but there were also times when I. wasn't at all sure if the author knew where it was going, which is not necessarily a good thing.
In fact, structurally the book is badly flawed: what begins as an evocation of personal displacement seems then to take on the pace and feel of a political thriller before finally heading somewhere else entirely. Indeed, I would say it was fatally flawed were it not for two things: it constantly commands the reader's interest, and it lays bare feelings that are so honest and true as to sweep aside gripes about form.
In the first of the book's three sections, we are introduced by narrator Richard Garay to his life in Argentina at the time of the Generals. Richard is the only child of an Argentinian father, who died when the boy was twelve, and of an English mother who in widowed old age, becomes a fervent expatriate Thatcherite.
This evocation of family and place is conveyed to us with a deliberate and telling detachment. By now we have learned that Richard is homosexual and that he is absorbed in his own private longings, pursuits and fears. Thus, when the Falklands invasion takes place, it's treated almost as an aside - as something that affects others, but has no importance to Richard's real, if secret, life.
Thus far, Richard is a person waiting to happen, and I was reminded of the anti hero of Moravias The Conformist, an echo that seemed to be confirmed when at the beginning of Part Two we are introduced to Susan and Donald Ford two shadowy American diplomats who start him working for them and who give him a public purpose in life.
Their unclear but possibly sinister agenda, which draws Richard into a social and business world in which he thrives, suggests to the reader that a murky melange of political double dealing and personal betrayal may form the real substance of the novel, but two thirds of the way through it shifts gear again and we end up with a tenderly expressed story about love in the time of AIDS.
By now (unlike the anti hero of Tile Conformist) Richard has matured into a person who is able both to confront his own suffering and to offer love and solace to another similarly affected person. This is movingly described, even if it never quite rises above the earnest sincerity of those worthy dramas about AIDS that we have seen on our television screens. Perhaps the emotional change from the earlier Richard is too abruptly introduced for it to register quite as it should.
In general, though, the sexual world described in the book strikes me as very accurately evoked and perceived; it is certainly entirely convincing in all of its details - not least the account of the unsuccessful sexual encounter between Richard and Susan, which has an erotic charge to match some of the book's homosexual encounters.
I liked, too, the way in which the sexual otherness of the narrator is portrayed as inextricably bound up with a more general otherness, including the narrator's dislocated relationship to Buenos Aires. I, have never been to Buenos Aires, but here, as refracted through a displaced personality, it has a potent eeriness, like a city in a disturbing dream. I was reminded (a real compliment) of the city in which Raskolnikov attains his terrible destiny.
In topography, theme and feeling, this is very different from either of Colm Toibin's previous two novels (each of which was also very different from the other), but it's different to them in stature, too. There were times when I wished for a few stylistic flourishes to vary the rhythms of a prose that aims (admirably) for a constant narrative clarity, but that's a quibble: this is one of the most absorbing new novels I've read in quite some time - and, unlike many recent novels, it's actually about something.