Colm Tóibín has been so long a part of the Irish literary scene that it can become too easy to take him for granted. This would be a serious mistake.
The convergent publication of a novella, A Long Winter, and a collection of essays and occasional pieces, Ship in Full Sail, are compelling illustrations of his unflagging vibrancy as both writer and critic, and of his unique position in the contemporary ecosystem of Irish literature.
In an essay entitled In Brief, Tóibín impishly suggests that “a novella is something no one wants,” but then he goes on to suggest why readers might indeed want it or what makes a novella teasingly different from other literary forms. “Plot does not have to grow or twist, as in a novel; characters do not have to change. The form does not depend on a single poetic or ironic moment (often letting us know how sad or how strange life is), as a short story does.”
A Long Winter, which was originally published as part of the short story collection Mothers and Sons (2006) and is now published separately as a novella, has much of the unsettling and indeterminate quality that attracts Tóibín to the form.
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A mother who has a secret drinking problem leaves home after a quarrel with her husband. In the high Catalan Pyrenees, there can be abrupt shifts in weather patterns, and snow that falls with little warning can lie on the ground for weeks. The novella tracks the long, repeatedly fruitless search for the missing mother in the frozen landscape.
Miquel, one of her sons, logs what happens not in the first person but in what Tóibín in the afterword calls the “slow, immersive, third-person intimate”. It is the spare, unadorned telling of the tale – with the almost unbearable tension of a problem not yet resolved – that gives the novella the allegorical permanence of a ballad or a folk tale.
When silence is everywhere, the reckless act – of walking out, of disappearing – becomes the only form of speech possible, with those left behind forced to parse the dark consequences. Tóibín’s consummate storytelling abilities are on full display in A Long Winter as is his enduring preoccupation with the shifting contours of loss, grief and the unspoken.
Tóibín was laureate for Irish fiction from 2022 to 2024, and Ship in Full Sail is a collection of his laureate lectures and of pieces published in his monthly blog on the laureate website.
The range of Tóibín’s enthusiasms is heady. He writes with equal passion about Maighréad Ní Dhomhnaill’s singing and about discovering the disruptive genius of Beethoven’s string quartets. He ponders the narrative possibilities of census returns alongside the need for an intellectual history of the anti-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War.
The relentlessly comparative turn of his mind means that he is quick to rescue a response to a cultural event from the redundancy of the news cycle. Writing about Colm Bairéad’s An Cailín Ciúin, for example, Tóibín not only draws on Foster, the Claire Keegan text which provided the inspiration for the film, but also discusses Stone in a Landslide by the Catalan novelist Maria Barbal and The Swan by the Icelandic writer Guðbergur Bergsson. Comparing the rural spaces of Ireland, Catalonia, and Iceland in these works allows him to explore ideas around shared landscapes and the integration of loss.
An abiding journalistic concern for precision makes the prose persuasive but uncluttered. Tóibín scrupulously avoids the mandarin mannerisms that can too often take down the informed critic. He is wryly alert to the goofiness that can result from an excess of cultural fervour. In a letter to his mother from the spring of 1974 he makes the candid confession: “Mother, I wish I could stop making an eejit of myself” before going on to tell the story of being at a student party, approaching the singer Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill and asking her to sing An Cailín Rua on the spot.
Keen readers of Tóibín’s fictional work will find interesting insights into the genesis of many of his most important works, such as the sight of Justice Declan Costello in full regalia in 1983 in the Four Courts preceded by a tipstaff providing the inspiration for The Heather Blazing.
Throughout Ship in Full Sail there is a sense of a writer who continually surrenders to an intense and vital curiosity about the worlds he has experienced and the worlds he has invented. When Tóibín touches on political and social matters he is animated by a seriousness that resists the moral high tone of the goodly and the godly but is sustained throughout by an unwavering belief that what writers must always do is to hold cant to account.
