By Bron Sibree for the Sunday Times
Nora Webster
Colm Toibin (Penguin)
****
Nora Webster is a masterful novel that its author began 14 years ago and which grew in part from his impulse “to recover and dramatise and deal with what had happened in our house when my father died”. Toibin, now 59, was 12. The death left a certain atmosphere in the Enniscorthy, Ireland house where he lived with his mother and brother. “That atmosphere,” says Toibin, “was always on my mind, all these years I’ve been carrying it with me and I still do.”
But writing Nora Webster, his eighth novel and 24th book, hasn’t rid him of the memory of that atmosphere. “It is a very particular sort of thing. But I didn’t want to write a memoir, and while I think poetry lends itself to lament, it’s very hard for poetry to get the ordinary business of grief and sorrow. What it was like on the days when nothing was said or nothing was mentioned, the putting of a life back together, the taking of a first step out into the world. I needed to work out a way of describing it, and I suppose it took me all that time to do it.”
He believes too, that writing his 2013 Man Booker Prize-shortlised novel, Testament of Mary, which re-imagines the inner life of Mary, mother of Jesus — and was, as one critic put it, “his boldest jump yet” — enabled him to complete Nora Webster, which is already being hailed as “pitch-perfect”. Set in Wexford, Ireland, in the late ’60s, it revolves around a woman struggling to rebuild her life after her beloved husband of 21 years has died. Fiercely private, sometimes difficult, Nora Webster is left with two young sons, two daughters on the cusp of adulthood, very little money and a quiet despair. But slowly, in small, incremental moments, with Northern Ireland’s Troubles gaining momentum in the background, she shrugs off these constraints and finds her voice – literally and metaphorically. It’s through music and a long forgotten talent for singing that she finds a path back into the world.
Toibin’s luminous rendering of Nora Webster’s inner life and the time and place in which she lives is nothing short of miraculous. But then he has long been famed for his preternatural skill in giving a “true” voice to women characters in a diverse body of work. The power of this narrative owes much to his desire to find truth in the simplest detail and to “enter the spirit of that character, whoever that character is, so that you’re always working from within”.
He’s also conscious of portraying a very different Ireland from the one more commonly in public view. “I had to be careful, because the clichés are there in a box; you can just take one out and use it. One being the all-powerful Catholic church that causes nothing but trouble, especially to women, and the other being the small town that manages to do nothing but damage to the free spirit.”
Thought and the time it takes in his writing life is a recurring theme in conversation with Toibin, who says the ongoing disruption of travelling between Ireland and New York – where he a Professor at Columbia University’s Department of English – enables him to see things more clearly. “In Ireland, what I love going back into is the light, the clouds, the seasons, the way things grow — there is a sort of Ireland that I’m interested in that isn’t political and that hasn’t been affected by anything much that I write about, and that matters to me.”
Follow Bron on Twitter @BronSibree
Book details
- Nora Webster by Colm Toibin
EAN: 9780670918157
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