Strangers in the family

Colm Tóibín's beautiful collection of short stories tells nine tales of uneasy, elusive relationships between mothers and sons. Review by Pico Iyer

Colm Tóibín's first book of stories begins with a man on an upper balcony, looking out on a city that is a “great emptiness”. The image is a haunting one, if only because Tóibín's last, much acclaimed novel, The Master, was preoccupied with a man watching the world from an upstairs window, a secret sharer, relishing the power of being an observer while terrified, deep down, of being observed himself. That man was Henry James. In ‘The Use of Reason', the opening story in Tóibín's beautiful and echoing collection, the man in question is a high-end thief in contemporary Ireland who, when not doing violence to others with calm ferocity, is picking off a Gainsborough and Rembrandt's ‘Portrait of an Old Woman', only to bury his treasure in the hills.

The thief is, of course, a master of his craft. He has a shrewd gift for assessing people and a solitary, meditative nature. He is a supple reader of the world; emerging from incarceration, he had the feeling “that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark, that a person was merely a disguise for another person, that something said was merely a code for something else”.

He would find nothing to contradict that impression in the half-lit, stealthy, lamenting stories that follow. Tóibín establishes his command over his materials early on, and the clenched, sepulchral tone never lets up. As ‘The Use of Reason' moves toward its conclusion, we meet the criminal's mother and suddenly see from whom he may have inherited his gifts for secrecy and treachery. The atmosphere of furtiveness and unease the thief has set seeps like a stain across the world.

You pick up a book called Mothers and Sons and expect something reassuring and warm, domestic; but it is part of Tóibín's pitiless and often brilliant vision to show that mothers and sons are suspicious even of one another, less pietàs than emblems of missed connections. All nine stories include a mother and son in some figuration, but seldom are they seen together; their encounters are usually glancing and have to do with embarrassment and things not said.

In some fundamental way, these are stories of people who are not there. “It was hard anyway since Jordi was absent from the other bed; it was the no sound coming from there kept him awake, the no snoring or rhythm of breathing, the no turning over which seemed to disturb him more than the wind, which appeared to have changed direction, blowing fiercely from the north in the few hours before the dawn, rattling the window.”

This is a book to be offered to anyone who savours some of the most accomplished and nuanced soundings contemporary fiction has to offer. The opening portrait of the robber and his mother sets the tone for what is a stunning series of variations on a theme. Tóibín is obsessed with people in hiding, often from themselves and from their acts and feelings, and what his book conveys is how much all of us are fugitives, terrified of being found out, even in the day-to-day context of an ordinary life. A dutiful woman loses her husband in a car crash and has to hide from her children and neighbours how desperate her finances have become; a widow, almost 80, hears that her son has been accused of terrible crimes, and goes on playing bridge and entertaining her grandsons as if to keep the truth remote. Pride keeps faces and lives intact in this writer's world, but just underneath the surface everything is collapsing.

Tóibín's real interest is in the constant, silent dialogue of watcher and watched. Each narrative spins out like the compulsive story of someone inside a confessional, with no one to talk to but himself.

The short story is a craftsman's form, and Tóibín's craft is immaculate. Not many writers in Britain and Ireland are working at this level of intensity and seriousness, with not a slack sentence in 270 pages and nothing shoddy or easily sardonic throughout. The short story also seems an ideal form for a writer much more interested in emotion, and the slow exposing of a character, than in action or community. In Mothers and Sons, Tóibín shows how he can get the figure at the window, and the modern city down below the fastidious novelist and the heroin dealer, into the same frame. Most books so full of artful sentences run the danger of being stage-managed perfections. Tóibín, however, never stints on feeling. Behind his impeccable sentences – and silences – something is always raging to get out.