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The title of Colm Tóibín’s new story collection seems to promise, at first glance, a return to familiar territory: a tour, perhaps, of old stomping grounds; a reconnection with earlier work. But as the pages turn, that suggestion of affinity is revealed to be a subtle bait and switch. The stories in this collection, it turns out, have to do with displacement, not familiarity; their news is not from Dublin, but from the places where Dublin’s news might land. They interrogate what it means, and how it feels, to live at one remove: from home, from loved ones, from the past.
That sense of dislocation is established in the opening story, The Journey to Galway, set during the first world war, in which once again the interaction between title and content proves delicately wrongfooting. This “journey”, we discover, is not about attaining a longed-for destination, nor even really about forward motion; rather, it’s a moment of suspension, between one reality and the next. An unnamed woman remembers the morning on which she received a telegram telling her that her son, a pilot in the British airforce, had been killed in action over Italy. On hearing the news, she knows she must take the train to Galway, to inform her son’s wife, Margaret. “In Margaret’s mind,” the woman realises, as she stares out of the train window, “Robert was still alive. Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time …” And it is this liminal time, untethered and provisional, that is the “journey” of the title – a Schrödinger’s-cat caesura, in which the terrible event both has and hasn’t taken place. “Until she appeared in the doorway of that house, there would not be death,” the woman thinks. “But once she appeared, death would live in that house.”
If this seems an oddly abstract reflection for a newly bereaved mother, that’s no accident: abstraction is the essential quality of Tóibín’s collection. Again and again, he takes devastating raw materials – a father on the cusp of indefinite separation from his daughter; a man struggling to save a brother who is slowly dying – and presents them lightly, obliquely, allowing his readers to absorb the breadth of their implications before becoming overwhelmed. Grief, betrayal and moral complication are rendered in calm, frictionless paragraphs; Tóibín lulls the reader into a kind of complicit attentiveness, so that the full force of what has happened only lands after the sentence, or the story, has finished. In place, time, and perspective, the collection jumps about wildly – the action moves from Spain to San Francisco, to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, to Argentina; from male to female and from first person to third; from the early 20th century to the 50s to the present day. But the lambent prose, the tone of cool reflection: these are what bind these stories, transforming them from separate moments into a coherent whole.
Those qualities are front and centre in the collection’s final two stories, A Free Man and The Catalan Girls. Here, Tóibín takes off the brakes, allowing them to swell and expand so that, collectively, they’re longer than the rest of the stories put together. The Catalan Girls, which is closer in length to a novella, tells the tale of three sisters, uprooted from Catalonia to Argentina in their early teens. Patiently, probingly, Tóibín considers the different ways in which they adopt and adapt to their new home, and the range of their responses when, half a century later, they discover that an aunt whom they haven’t seen since childhood has left them her house in Catalonia in her will. The story’s length permits nuances of allegiance, language and loss to emerge, so that when the final, quiet conclusion is reached, it lands like a blow.
But it is A Free Man that is the collection’s standout piece. If there’s a flaw in the other stories, it’s that the sense of abstraction can tip over into a lack of feeling; the characters at times read as dispassionate observers of their lives and circumstances, rather than flesh-and-blood participants. But in A Free Man, the question of the extent to which our passions define us is the point. The story follows the path of Joe, a man in late middle age, newly released from prison in Ireland and disowned by his family. The nature of Joe’s crimes, and the breadth of his guilt, are unveiled slowly, alongside other details from his life that may – or may not – contextualise them. These gradual revelations are interspersed with cheerless scenes from his current existence: a bruising encounter with a banking clerk; a stuffy hotel room, where he “woke and slept and woke again” and arose feeling “drained” and “desperate”. As past and present unfold in tandem, our empathy builds even as our unease mounts – and Tóibín’s decision to leave us poised between the two, without resolution, sits as a comment on the ambiguity at the heart of the tale. In A Free Man, form and content come together to enhance one another, and the result is a story of profound, disquieting power.
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
