Publishers are very naughty. Even as many of them seem increasingly to disdain journalism, they’re often perfectly happy to repackage the stray bits and pieces of their luckiest writers as “essays” before sticking them opportunistically between hard covers. In the case of the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, I’ll give Viking a semi-pass for doing precisely this. He is a beloved and celebrated novelist. But I should also say that subscribers to the London Review of Books may feel a bit miffed should they cough up for A Guest at the Feast, for the simple reason that the majority of its contents appeared first there.
Luckily, I’m not a subscriber. This work was all new to me, with the exception of Cancer: My Part in its Downfall, the essay with which the book opens (I read it first online). An account of Tóibín’s treatment for testicular cancer, it doesn’t really set the tone for those that follow it; their focus is mostly on the old Ireland, its sins strung out here like beads on a rosary. But it does whet the appetite. Like many other writers on the same subject, Tóibín begins by being determinedly straightforward, even deadpan, about his illness. “It all started with my balls,” he writes, as blithe as if they were for ping-pong.
