A fragile beauty

Colm Tóibín’s short stories hinge on lonely figures seeking what one of his narrator’s describes as ‘the chance… to associate with beauty’.

Colm Tóibín’s short stories hinge on lonely figures seeking what one of his narrator’s describes as ‘the chance… to associate with beauty’. Either that, or mourning the loss of that chance.

It’s a fine subject, and in the nine stories collected in The Empty Family, Tóibín’s first publication since last year’s wonderful Brooklyn, he addresses it in narratives of remarkable scope and variety. The settings range from Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s birthplace) to Dublin, from Menorca to Barcelona, and in these various settings Tóibín describes the experiences of the young and the very old, homosexual and heterosexual, Irish and Spanish, all with equal assurance.

And yet, for all their range, Tóibín’s stories are curiously all of a piece. The author brings to his varicoloured characters the same patient attentiveness, the same empathy unclouded by sentimentality, the same pellucid style.

Those familiar with Tóibín’s novels will, moreover, find intriguing correspondences here. The final story, for instance, ‘The Street’, transposes Brooklyn — the story of a heterosexual Irish girl adjusting to her solitary, hardworking life in Brooklyn in the 1950s — to the experience of a homosexual Pakistani man sent to work in Barcelona in the period after Abu Ghraib. All the key terms, in other words, are wildly discordant. And yet it feels, in essence, like the same story: a young unwilling immigrant encountering love.

And just as Tóibín’s 2004 novel, The Master, was a fictional reconstruction of the internal life of Henry James, which drew liberally from James’s notebooks, the plot of ‘Silence’ is seeded by one of the entries in those notebooks. Its main character is haunted by ‘a single inescapable thought — that love had eluded her, that love would not come back, that she was alone and would have to make the best of being alone’.