In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world, ostensibly at least for the sake of his art. In Mothers and Sons, Tóibín returns to the theme of the deep need for, and painful cost of, emotional withdrawal, this time concentrating upon the maternal bond.
All of the short stories in this collection are about separation, which is felt as both necessary and a form of betrayal. Obviously, it will take little ingenuity for critics to find other intertwined themes; and the stories are indeed about motherlands as well as mothers, and about the need for both belonging and escape in life and in art.
The sons in all these stories are teenagers or older, needing space for their own lives, particularly when these involve homosexual sex (which is in itself a betrayal of most mothers’ hopes). Several involve the separation of death, and the betrayal of the dead by the living: in one, a bereaved son goes to a drug-party on a beach; in another, the mother muses that her son does not know whether his doting grandmother’s death ‘was the lifting of a burden … or a loss he could not contemplate’.
Many of the stories involve the shock of a sudden discovery of distance. That moment when a mother suddenly sees her son as a grown-up stranger was supremely well caught by Alison Lurie in The War Between the Tates, where the mother for a moment does not recognise her son in a group of youths sniggering loutishly on a street-corner. Seeing without being seen is important: in Tóibín’s stories, mothers spy on their sons, trying to catch by surprise the adults they have become. In ‘The Name of the Game’, Nancy, who has built up a fish-and-chip shop that her 16-year-old son Gerard wants to take over, watches ‘from her bedroom window’ as he tries out the ‘brittle and invented personality’ he puts on in the company of older men. It is both touching and repellent: ‘As the two of them started to talk and laugh, she saw Gerard putting his hands in his pockets and sticking out his belly.’
Looking through windows emphasises alienation, emotions seen but not felt, ‘athwart a pane of molten glass’. In one story, the mother is caught doing it: ‘Suddenly John glanced at the window and saw her watching him. He shrugged as if to say that he would give nothing away, she could look at him as long as she liked.’
Even when glances meet, they may equally repel or evoke intimacy. (‘She faced him as she spoke, holding his gaze, which had become, as he spoke, more masculine and confident.’) The most intensely ambiguous, perhaps, is the held gaze in ‘A Song’, where a mother sings a song about treacherous love straight at the son she abandoned 19 years earlier, who chances to be in the audience. It is unclear if she recognises him: the emotions summoned up in her song are both unbearably intense and cruelly impersonal.
A good metaphor, perhaps, for the artistic impersonality for which Tóibín strives: her song combines ‘naturalness’ with traces of ‘the old style … almost declamatory at times, with hardly any interest in the sweetness of the tune’. Tóibín’s style is unshow-off, nor is he interested in merely linguistic sweetness. Clarity and beautifully nuanced precision create his artistic distance.
The first story in the book, ‘The Use of Reason’, shows, however, the dark and chilling side of impersonality. The unnamed central character is an empty-souled criminal who is a near-psychopathic loner. Solitude and silence come to him ‘like power’; at moments of crisis ‘his mind fixed on some point in the distance, something both remote and precise’. His mother is a raddled drunk who exacts respect from the neighbourhood with the ‘empty’ myth that her son is ‘fiercely loyal’, but is herself ‘a squealer’. Even in this bleak and brutal milieu, however, the uses of friendless reason are limited: he finds himself out of his depth when he is saddled with stolen paintings that he cannot shift, since he has no contacts he can trust.
The short story turns out to be well suited to Tóibín’s talents. In his longer fiction, the finest moments (often hanging poised between the drag of nostalgia and the thrust of impersonality) sometimes seem frustratingly static. In Mothers and Sons, this becomes a strength. Tóibín has the sureness of touch not to ruin the balance with spurious twists. We suspect from the outset of ‘A Priest in the Family’ what the son’s betrayal of his proud mother will be; and Tóibín does not attempt to jazz up the dreary usualness of his story, which is instead about the old woman’s withdrawal behind the barriers of her pride.
The last story in this excellent collection is set in the Pyrenees, and perhaps gains an extra edge of intensity from geographical distance. Spying — through plate-glass windows and binoculars — plays a crucial part in a superbly powerful tale of betrayal and desertion. Quint- essential Tóibín.
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