Colm Toibin is the opposite of the “reclusive writer” (think J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon). If you catch any of his many interviews or media appearances, you’ll experience a warm and gregarious personality, speaking at breakneck speed, full of gossip, mischief, sparkle.
Yet when he stands up to read his work, fiction or non-fiction, the pace slows dramatically, his voice become rhythmic, deliberate, mellifluous, lingering over a cadence or a detail. His prose style, if not quite austere, tends towards the restrained, the scrupulous, the exact and the precise.
At his best Colm Toibin is a great observer of the world and appreciator of his fellow artists.Credit:New York Times
He is an extremely funny man but has, curiously enough, never written a funny book, though the first in this collection of essays, Cancer: My Part in its Downfall is a masterpiece of mordant self-deprecation.
Australian readers will know Toibin mainly as the acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and, perhaps, as an essayist (eight of the 11 essays here first appeared in The London Review of Books). However, when I was growing up in Dublin in the 1980s and early ’90s, he was best known as a newspaper columnist and magazine editor.
A Guest at the Feast by Colm Toibin.
This journalistic background, touched on in several pieces here, is the key to understanding him as a writer. He’s concerned with facts, rather than symbols, suspicious of the portentous or mystifying, whether of religious authority or Irish nationalism. His forensic prose, if appealing artistically, also has the dispassionate and neutral quality of the reporter.
This is one reason why, while he often writes about himself, Toibin is not particularly self-revelatory. The title essay in this collection, the longest piece, is the most autobiographical, dwelling a great deal on his childhood in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, but ranging also to his early adulthood in Dublin. Its division into sections gives it an elliptical quality, pivoting between memory and social history, but also fastening on to descriptive details.
It’s hardly a surprise that a gay man born in Ireland in 1955 would be well-equipped at deflection and self-concealment. Yet it becomes in its way a whole aesthetic of surfaces.
Reflecting on the eroding cliffs on the coast of Wexford that found its way into several of his novels and short stories, he writes, “I suppose this is an interesting image of time and a metaphor for what time does. But I am more interested in the exact thing itself – the actual detail of this landscape that I have known for so long falling, dissolving, being washed away, not being there anymore.”
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