James Joyce sincerely believed that his short story collection, Dubliners, the greatest in the language, could remedy the paralysis he diagnosed in Ireland. “I believe that in composing my chapter of moral history in exactly the way I have composed it I have taken the first step towards the spiritual liberation of my country,” he told his reluctant publisher, Grant Richards, in 1906, eight years before the book finally appeared.
Joyce himself never repeated anything as a writer. What followed Dubliners, though, was a century of Irish short stories all hopelessly in its wake: so many beautifully turned tales of restricted, confined lives, on the one hand, and of grievous displacement on the other, escapes that are no escape.
Colm Tóibín is a late, perhaps the last, flowering of this tradition. Born in 1955, in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, he grew up in a family where there was, he says, “a great deal of silence” and it might as well have been the 19th century. Moreover, he was gay and male homosexuality remained criminal in Ireland until 1993. Tóibín left for Barcelona when he was 20 and now lives in the States.
He has published 11 novels, as well as much non-fiction, including fictionalised biographies of Henry James (The Master, 2004) and Thomas Mann (The Magician, 2021) as well as the great story of displacement, Brooklyn (2009), and its eventual sequel of return, Long Island (2024). His recurrent themes are loneliness and dislocation, opportunities missed, homes abandoned and secrets never disclosed, not to mention, to cut a long story short, death. A famous party animal in his day, Tóibín is not a happy bunny in his fiction, to say the least, not one of the great lookers forward.
Misery and discovery
The News from Dublin is his third collection of short stories. It should be said at once that they are not just well-crafted (as if for The New Yorker where many first appeared) but exquisitely written, delicate and tactful, a refinement of the “style of scrupulous meanness” Joyce created in Dubliners.
The first, The Journey to Galway, sorrowfully traces Lady Gregory’s journey to Coole in 1918 after the death of her only son Robert Gregory, flying for the British in Italy, to break the news to his family: “She was moving westward like cruel death itself, she thought.”
The News from Dublin is another misery, about an Enniscorthy man in, presumably, the late 1940s, travelling to Dublin on behalf of his family to beg the Minister of Health for the newly discovered wonder drug, streptomycin, for his younger brother, dying of TB. Not likely. “He had nothing to tell them except that his journey to Dublin had been in vain.”
Tóibín often uses Catalonia as a para-Ireland; rural, Catholic, conservative but with a revolutionary history. In the longest story, The Catalan Girls, three sisters, taken by their poverty-stricken mother to Argentina as children, return to Catalonia only in their sixties, when a relative unexpectedly bequeaths them her house in the mountains. The youngest, whose whole life has been painfully dislocated, finds herself at home at last.
One foot in the present
Some of these stories of exile strive to be more contemporary. In Five Bridges, a Dublin man who has overstayed in California for 30 years on a tourist visa needs to leave when Trump cracks down on illegal immigrants but establishes a promising relationship with his estranged American daughter before going. In the oddest story, Sleep, a gay Irish man in New York revels in his relationship with a Jewish guy 20 years younger, met online, but alienates him by his night terrors, only addressed when he flies back to Dublin to be hypnotised by a therapist.
So the past still exerts its pull — but the Ireland Tóibín writes from is gone. In the real Ireland, modernity has struck. The economy has boomed, churchgoing has collapsed, immigration matters as much as emigration, and gay love is embraced. These stories, however highly polished, are all antiques, more than Joyce’s masterpiece ever will be.
The News from Dublin: Stories by Colm Tóibín is out now (Picador, £20)
