News from Dublin Review by Colm Tóibín – Hidden Short Stories About Far From Home | Short stories

TThe title of Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short stories seems, at first glance, to promise a return to familiar territory: a tour, perhaps, of old stomping grounds; Reconnect with previous work. But as the pages turn, the proposal for rapprochement turns out to be a subtle bait-and-switch. It turns out that the stories in this collection are about displacement, not familiarity; Their news is not from Dublin, but from places where Dublin news might reach. They wonder what it means, what it feels like, to live in one place: of home, of your loved ones, of the past.

This sense of dislocation is established in the opening story, ‘The Journey to Galway’, set during the First World War, where the interplay between title and content once again proves completely wrong. We discover that this “journey” is not about arriving at the desired destination, nor even about moving forward; Rather, it is a moment of suspension between reality and reality. An unnamed woman recalls the morning she received a telegram informing her that her son, an RAF pilot, had been killed in action over Italy. Upon hearing the news, she knew she had to take the train to Galway to tell her daughter-in-law, Margaret. “In Margaret’s mind, Robert was still alive,” the woman realized as she stared out the train window. “Maybe that meant something; it gave Robert some strange extra time…” And this liminal time, unbound and temporary, is the “journey” of the title—the halt of Schrödinger’s cat, where the terrible event happened and did not happen. “Until you appear in the doorway of that house, there will be no death,” the woman thinks. “But as soon as she appears, death will live in that house.”

If this sounds like an oddly abstract reflection on a recently bereaved mother, that’s no coincidence: abstraction is the primary feature of Tóibín’s collection. Again and again, he takes on devastating raw material – a father on the cusp of indefinite separation from his daughter; A man struggles to save his slowly dying brother—and he presents it lightly, obliquely, allowing his readers to grasp the breadth of its implications before it overwhelms them. Grief, betrayal, and moral complexities are presented in calm, frictionless passages. Tóibin lulls the reader into a kind of complicit interest, so that the full force of what has happened does not fall until after the sentence or story is over. In space, time and perspective, the group moves wildly – ​​the action moves from Spain to San Francisco, to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, to Argentina; Male to female and first to third person; From the early 1900s to the 1950s to the present day. But the flexible prose and the tone of quiet contemplation are what connect these stories, transforming them from separate moments into a cohesive whole.

These qualities are front and center in the collection’s final two stories, “The Free Man” and “The Catalan Girls.” Here, Tóibín lifts the brakes, allowing them to swell and expand so that together they are longer than the rest of the stories combined. The Catalan Girls, more of a novella, tells the story of three sisters, uprooted from Catalonia to Argentina in their early teens. Patiently, and probingly, Tóibín considers the different ways in which they embrace and adapt to their new home, and the range of their reactions when they discover, half a century later, that the aunt they have not seen since childhood has left them her house in Catalonia in her will. The length of the story allows the nuances of loyalty, language, and loss to emerge, so that when the final quiet ending is reached, it falls like a blow.

But “Free Man” is the standout piece in the collection. If there is a flaw in other stories, it is that a sense of abstraction can turn into a lack of emotion; The characters are sometimes read as dispassionate observers of their lives and circumstances, rather than flesh-and-blood participants. But in A Free Man, the question of how well we define our emotions is the important point. The story follows the path of Joe, a late-middle-aged man, newly released from prison in Ireland and disowned by his family. The nature of Joe’s crimes, the breadth of his guilt, are slowly revealed, along with other details from his life that you may or may not put into context. These gradual discoveries are interspersed with bleak scenes from his current existence: a traumatic encounter with a banker; A stifling hotel room, where he “woke and slept and woke up again” and rose feeling “exhausted” and “desperate”. As past and present unfold side by side, our sympathy builds even as our anxiety mounts – and Tóibín’s decision to leave us between the two, unresolved, is a commentary on the mystery at the heart of the tale. In A Free Man, form and content come together to reinforce each other, and the result is a story of profound and unsettling power.

The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador (£20). To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.