Another remarkable work from Colm Tóibín. I find short stories harder to manage, but I was captivated by these. I will write about a few that were particularly poignant for me.
The first, “The Journey to Galway,” tells about a woman hearing the news that her son, a fighter pilot apparently during the Second World War, was killed. She knows immediately the telegram brings bad news as it is addressed to her daughter-in-law. The woman in the post office knew that the news of Robert’s death had to be broken by his mother, so she arranges for it to be delivered to her, rather than to Robert’s wife Margaret. As she journeys to Galway where her daughter-in-law lives, she muses, “In Margaret’s mind, she thought, Robert was still alive. Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time.”
The next story opens with a description of an Irishman recently arrived in Barcelona, as he struggles to complete an application to use city bicycles there. Although he is happy to walk around the city, he worries that an Irish tourist will recognize him. It is slowly revealed that Joe moved to Barcelona when he left prison after serving ten years. He had been a teacher, an excellent one, and his crime had been preying on boys who were his students.
What made this a riveting story was seeing this man at close range, who does not think of himself as a monster. His conversations with another Irishman in Barcelona who was willing to help him while remaining distant were the means Tóibín used to reveal his thoughts. When Denis asked him if he was sorry for what he had done, he responded in a momentary lack of control that he was sorry he had been found out.
In prison a psychologist asked him to read aloud from one of the victim statements. He had taught himself to distance himself from those words, that it seemed impossible this had happened to these victims, let alone that it had been done by him. She noted that it was clear he had been a great teacher, very dedicated. She asked him if he was the much-loved teacher who happened to abuse some of his students or whether he was an abuser who happened to be a brilliant teacher. “Is the abuse—and some of the victims’ statements are really shocking—who you are, or is it something you did.?”He finally found the words of contrition and self-realization that enabled her to write a report so that he would be released in only 10 years. Ultimately, he felt a great gap between what others saw in him and what he believed about himself, “in all its confusion.”
The story that shares its title with the book was especially meaningful for me. It’s set in the late 1940s in Enniscorthy focused on Maurice and his wife Nora. Maurice’s brother has TB and Nora won’t let Maurice visit to avoid the contagion; another brother asks Maurice to travel to Dublin to visit a politician their father had known to see if they can get access to a new drug that, according to the news, could cure TB. As Maurice undertakes this journey, there were mentions of the Dail (the lower house of parliament), Fianna Fáil and Fine Gail (major political parties still important), and Eamon de Valera (a prominent political figure in Ireland from the 1930s to 1960s), all familiar to me from the podcast The Irish Passport. The father had known the fictional politician the family hoped would give them access to the new drug when they were interned at Frongoch, where 1,800 Irish republicans were interned after the 1916 Easter Rising. Not surprisingly, the news Maurice brought from Dublin was not good. Along the way I read about the development of drugs to treat TB in the late 1940s and was excited to see the role of the Mayo Clinic in that effort. It was later that it occurred to me that Nora was the subject of one of my favorite of Tóibin’s books Nora Webster, the story of the recovery of a woman who has children to raise after the death of her husband.
Colm Tóibín is a treasure.
Colm Tóibín, The News from Dublin, Scribner, 2026, 304 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.