Colm Toibin's latest novel begins as Helen O'Doherty slowly wakes, along with her household: her dependable and even-tempered husband Hugh, and her two young sons, the quieter, older Cathal and the younger, more malevolent Manus. A party is swiftly prepared for at the O'Doherty place and then amicably weathered while Toibin establishes his territory. This is, above all, to be Helen's story, heavily coloured with her memories, her recurrent anxieties, the marks of her past loves and past pains. Her enduring sense of isolation and insecurity begins to be revealed as the intimacy of the book's scale is defined. The Blackwater Lightship concerns itself with interior realities, the private stories that sustain a personality, the resentments that linger in a bloodline, the politics and penalties of family life.
Early in the narrative, Helen's menfolk decamp to await her, on a holiday in Donegal. This leaves Helen conveniently isolated in their Dublin home when she receives the news that stops her joining them - her beloved and only brother Declan is dying of AIDS. Not only that, but he has decided she should be the one to tell their eccentric grandmother and chilly mother the bad news. Within the first forty pages, Helen is hauled out of her comfortable urban domesticity and propelled into a confrontation with her past and a series of fraught days spent penned in a ramshackle former B & B on the south-east coast with granny, mother, brother, two complete strangers and a pair of hypersensitive cats.
Initially, Toibin spends a great deal of time establishing Helen's motivations, her personal landscapes, past and present. This lays the foundations upon which the fundamental tensions of the book will rest but can lead, in some early passages, to starkly expositional writing, the bones of the character's motivation laid out in abrupt summary: "She realised that the bitter resentment against her mother which had clouded her life had not faded; for a long time she had hoped that she would never have to think about it again". These clumsier moments seem all the more striking when set within a text filled with passages of exemplary subtlety, finely-drawn atmosphere and beguiling simplicity.
Helen's tendency towards rather painstaking self-analysis settles back and the novel takes off as soon as its other major cast members are assembled. Declan makes a harrowingly convincing focus of attention as the final stages of his illness wrack him and he makes a final pilgrimage to his grandmother's home, within range of the Blackwater light. His two gay friends, the reserved Paul and the rather more louche Larry, slowly emerge as complex individuals, beyond the usual stereotypes of homosexuality in fiction. Their gradual establishment of good relations with their hostess, the instinctively homophobic Granny, is convincingly faltering, the peace process twisting, stalling and advancing.
AS Declan's last days tick by in the midst of growing claustrophobia, both Larry and Paul begin to tell their stories, to outline the histories that brought them to this point. Storytelling is, indeed, at the heart of The Blackwater Lightship. Each character gets their chance to expand, explain, excuse and explain their identities and actions with highly personal narratives. Toibin is particularly good at creating a variety of voices and then fitting them together into an increasingly moving pattern of bereavements, muffled loves and soured tenderness. There is no sentimentality here, only an acknowledgement of flawed humanity and a kind of lament for the missed opportunities of any life. Helen's story is, of course, central. Slowly, we are allowed into her recollections of childhood abandonments and misunderstandings, the traumatic death of her father and the effective loss in life of her mother and grandmother. Even as a girl, Helen realises, she was someone ". . . who watched everything, who took everything in as though it were not happening to them". In fact, Helen's enduring wounds, resentments and fears keep the book well away from a saccharine resolution. The gradual revelations that work further and further into her character give the later parts of the book a genuine intensity when Toibin's clear prose chimes perfectly with echoes from Helen's childhood and an eye for detail.
And Toibin is at his best in the details. A mother comforts herself with a familiar touch to her dying son's forehead and tries to be glad he has no temperature, a daughter attempts to conjure up her dead father by laying out his clothes, a man weeps beside the eternally devouring sea, an old woman whispers to her cats. Toibin catches the moments best fitted to illuminate the mysteries of other lives and the occasionally savage bewilderments of reality.
A. L. Kennedy's latest novel, Everything You Need, was published earlier this year