James Walton

Colm Toibin’s restraint – like his characters’ – is quietly overwhelming

A review of Nora Webster, by Colm Toibin. Anyone who expects a novel about a bereaved wife with four small kids to emote wildly has obviously never read any Toibin before

CHELTENHAM, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 12: Man Booker Shortlist 2013 writer, Colm Toibin at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 12, 2013 in Cheltenham, England. (Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images) 
issue 04 October 2014

In Colm Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel Brooklyn, Eilis Lacy, somewhat to her own surprise, leaves 1950s Enniscorthy (Tóibín’s own home town in County Wexford where several of his books are set) for a new life in the United States. Before that,

Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, having the same friends and neighbours… that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children.

Now, in Nora Webster, we meet a woman who has done all of the above — a contrast made clear in the opening pages when Eilis’s mother makes a brief appearance to lament the fact that her daughter didn’t stay in Ireland.

By then it’s 1968 and Nora has recently become yet another of Tóibín’s main characters — including the mother of Christ in last year’s Man Booker-shortlisted The Testament of Mary — to be suffering a bereavement. Her husband Maurice has just died, leaving Nora, always the less outgoing one in the marriage, to look after their four children, three of whom are still at school. But if that leads anyone to expect a novel that emotes wildly, then they obviously haven’t read Tóibín before. Instead, this is a book that, perhaps even more than his previous work, both explores and largely relies on the unsaid.

Nora does sometimes ruminate on being alone — or more precisely, on ‘wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted’. Mostly, however, she simply gets on with it, patiently enduring a stream of clumsily well-intentioned visitors and agreeing to return to her pre-marriage job as an office bookkeeper (‘She told no one about the arrangement’). By my calculations, not until page 252 does she and any of the children have a conversation about missing their father — and that lasts for five lines.

GIF Image

Disagree with half of it, enjoy reading all of it

TRY 3 MONTHS FOR $5
Our magazine articles are for subscribers only. Start your 3-month trial today for just $5 and subscribe to more than one view

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in