Mother/Country: Politics of the Personal in the Fiction of Colm Tóibín by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (review)

Colm Tóibín is among the most versatile and prolific of contemporary Irish authors. Novelist, short story writer, journalist, playwright, travel writer, and social commentator; his settings as diverse as Argentina, Catalunya, Brooklyn, Dublin, the Middle East, and his native Enniscorthy; inhabiting the skins of characters as far-flung as an Irish judge, internationally renowned writers Henry James and Lady Augusta Gregory, Mary the mother of Jesus, Pakistani immigrants in Barcelona, an Irish immigrant torn between the New World and old family ties, a man facing imminent death by AIDS, Tóibín demonstrates both an impressive imaginative range and a readiness to venture outside of the familiar.

Or not. For as Kathleen Costello-Sullivan argues in Mother/Country, regardless of the variety of his settings and characters, Tóibín is preoccupied with the interrelationship between “personal and socio-political narratives,” how they “collude and collide to shape not only individual subjects, but also communal realities. . . .” Focusing primarily on five novels—The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), and Brooklyn (2009), Costello-Sullivan also makes reference to Tóibín’s short fiction, journalism, and unpublished work shared with her by the author. Arguing that to read Tóibín’s work as either personal or political serves him ill, she notes the heady mix of both that shaped him. Born in Enniscorthy, Tóibín might well have used the title of his second book of short stories, The Empty Family (2010), to describe his own childhood. He spent an extended time separated from both parents during his father’s fatal illness—and indeed, the rifts and silences of families are frequent concerns of his fiction. Though his father, Micheál, co-purchased Enniscorthy Castle to transform it into a museum and embraced both nationalism and Catholicism, Tóibín describes himself as a revisionist and has been an eloquent critic of the Catholic church. Growing up gay in a nation that did not decriminalize homosexuality until 1993—the same year that Tóibín publicly declared his own sexual orientation—witnessing the corrosive violence shredding Northern Ireland as well as the tsunami of economic and social change of the last several decades, Tóibín, prolific though he may be, has only begun to strip back the layers of his own psychic peat bog.

Given Tóibín’s stature in contemporary Irish literature, it remains surprising that it has taken so long for a sustained single-author consideration of his work to appear. Though scholarly studies of individual works as well as of Tóibín’s thematic preoccupations have appeared widely in journals, Mother/Country’s only predecessor to date is Paul Delaney’s Reading Colm Tóibín (2008), a fine collection of wide-ranging critical essays. Costello-Sullivan’s meticulous research and extensive bibliography will be valuable to any scholar studying Tóibín’s writing, and her thought-provoking interpretations of his novels will generate lively critical discussions.

By focusing on the intersections of the personal and political in Tóibín’s writing, Costello-Sullivan explores common, but no less crucial, preoccupations of contemporary Irish literature: the formation of national identity, the impact of both lived and written history upon individual lives, the importance of place, the power of silence. Yet, given the current reluctance of many academic presses to publish single-author studies—a great loss not only to literary criticism but also to students wishing to pursue in-depth study of individual writers—Mother/Ireland provides a focused consideration of how Tóibín leaves his own imprint on Irish literature.

The South, though set primarily in Spain, from its title outward invites comparison to Ireland, and its Irish protagonist, Katherine Proctor, despite her efforts to escape history personal...