There is a children's game, perhaps not quite a game, called the Chinese burn. Played out in silence, it involves grasping your adversary's wrist with both hands and twisting the skin in opposite directions until the intensity of friction causes the victim to cry out. Colm Tóibín's fiction, ever since his astonishing debut, with The South, 24 years ago, delivers the same effect. In Nora Webster the slow build-up of pressure, the sense of pain experienced and barely withstood, is cumulatively almost unbearable, and the climax provides a catharsis that raises the hairs on the back of your head. This is a work of extraordinary accomplishment.
It is the late 1960s. Nora has been recently widowed and must come to terms with her life in the Co Wexford town where she has spent her life, the fiercely realised Enniscorthy that appears in much of Tóibín's fiction, with its atmospheric hinterland of the eroding coast around Blackwater and Curracloe. You might think we have been here before: we may recognise names dropped into Nora's thoughts (including Lily Devereux, from The Blackwater Lightship); and her efforts to redefine her life partly echo The Name of the Game, a consummate story in Mothers and Sons, in which a widow converts her late husband's failing business into a chip shop, to general disapproval.
But the creation of Nora is something utterly new. Like Katherine Proctor, the runaway painter in The South, people do not find her easy to like; unlike Katherine, she has to reconstruct a life with a family around her, and to fight battles on her home ground. And fight she does, although often in an implicit, sideways manner. The confrontations – with a bullying colleague at work, with an arrogant clerical teacher at her son's school – reflect the highly charged antipathies and snobberies of provincial life, as well as Nora's acid eye for other people's self-importance. But they also help construct a character who is trying not only to survive but also to find new strategies that might enable her to survive – and who is sometimes, as they might say in Enniscorthy, her own worst enemy. This is expressed by a narrative whose apparent ease and lucidity conceal a breathtaking degree of imaginative control.
Subtly calibrated
One method is the slow, incremental release of information about Nora’s family life and past, especially her relationship with her mother: not until 300 pages in do we overhear a conversation that reveals the way her sisters and mother saw Nora as a “demon”, and the implacable side of her nature which had been smoothed over by her marriage to a much-loved local teacher. The subtly calibrated revelation of family patterns and pressures is classic Tóibín territory, but he has never mapped it better than here.
Nora sent her sons away to relations during their father’s fatal illness, and this has altered her relationship to them in ways that she only barely intuits. When her easy-going sister-in-law tries to please her by remarking how clever and funny her elder son is, “Nora resisted the urge to say that she did not find Donal funny and Jim Mooney did not find him clever”; nor has he shown her any of the photographs he has developed in the darkroom his aunt created for him. Time and again, she wishes to retire alone to a room, in a house where everyone is asleep. The solipsism, as well as the exhaustion, of deep grief is inexorably conveyed.
A dominant theme here concerns things unsaid, and silence: Nora knows the power of keeping her mouth shut. (Faced with the condescension of an aspiring local grande dame, “she understood that it might have been difficult for Peggy Gibney to remain ordinary, but she saw no reason why she should sit opposite her and offer anything except silence.”) But, in a masterly stroke, one of her routes to survival is through music. The discovery of Schubert and Beethoven, the awkward relationships within the local gramophone society, choosing and buying a “stereo”, the discovery of Dublin’s record shops, the singing lessons taken with the shrewdly eccentric local teacher, slowly open a new world. Like other worlds, it has its limitations and disappointments, but the dimension it provides takes Nora beyond her worries over her children, and even the ache of bereavement. Beethoven’s Archduke Trio becomes a kind of leitmotif, and heralds the book’s climactic punch.
This is connected with the presence of the numinous and unseen, a sense that hovers just beyond realisation, during an encounter on a beach or a moment spent in the back room that Nora doggedly decorates and furnishes for her own use – a step taken, like many of her steps, to the uncertain disapproval of her children. And it is those children who serve as links to another world outside, as the extent of her sons' own sadness becomes slowly apparent to her, and as her daughter explores the world of student radicalism in Dublin. There is a wonderful scene where Áine materialises on The Late Late Show alongside a group of feminists. And the slow explosion of Northern Ireland is inferred through that same medium, with the television screen suggesting an ominous world outside the certainties of Co Wexford life. People gossip sotto voce about the rising but sulphurous reputation of Charles Haughey. There is a strong sense, as in The Heather Blazing, of pressures mounting that will break the old moulds forever.
Exacting control
As elsewhere in Tóibín’s work, personal liberation is patterned against the larger political picture, but with an exacting control that never becomes a crude counterpoint; it is one of the ways in which the structure of the book itself resembles and suggests a complex piece of music. The climax that the book builds to is a part of this, as is the fugue-like ending. Above all, the spaces that Nora inhabits – at work, at home, on a Spanish holiday with an irritating relative – are perfectly realised, with a powerful economy. The “watery light” of an overfurnished sitting room, the dark-blue and white patterns of a Spanish townscape, are drawn with the economy of a canvas by Jack Hanlon or Tony O’Malley.
This recalls the effects of The South, and Nora Webster at once takes its place with the very best of Tóibín's fiction. To those Co Wexford landscapes explored in previous novels he brings the powerful psychological heft of The Master or his consummate novella, A Long Winter, along with the swift economy of Testament. In delineating a fully realised interior life patterned against a confining local society, this latest novel is his most Flaubertian work yet. It is hard to imagine what on earth he will do next.
