In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem for the novelist. The novel is happier in a secular space.” He is writing about Marilynne Robinson, a writer skilled, as he says, at “making religious thought easy” – easy for the reader, however unbelieving, to accept. It is a skill he admires. Yet his own novels hardly inhabit a “secular space”. Catholicism is a live presence in all the ones set in Ireland, while his interest in Christian myth even led him, in The Testament of Mary, to create the first-person narrative of Jesus’s mother as she nears death.
These essays, published over the course of more than 25 years, confirm his interest in religion and religiosity. “Religiosity” because he restlessly documents the hypocrisies and misdeeds of the Roman Catholic clergy. Yet he does so with the mingled perplexity and outrage of one who is steeped in Catholicism. “I was born in Ireland and brought up a Catholic.” Almost every one of these essays is shaped by one of these two facts, sometimes by both.
