Colm Tóibín: sober, intense master Flight to Catalonia

I heard Tóibín talk a dozen years ago and he said of a nov­el­ist's work: “Your first task is self-sup­pres­sion.” And then he cited Henry James's “Drama­tise, drama­tise!” In The South he does both to great ef­fect. Tóibín ab­sents him­self from the story (with ruth­less dis­ci­pline, tough to achieve in a first novel) and, in a se­ries of hard-hit­ting scenes de­fined by place and weather, con­structs a dra­matic story of painters fight­ing for sur­vival under the Franco dic­ta­tor­ship. Katharine is self-ob­sessed, which ini­tially she needs to be, in order to break out from Ire­land and pur­sue her free­dom else­where. The main arc of the novel is her strug­gle to see things clearer, her fight through pain to un­der­stand­ing.

Tóibín knows and loves –or if not loves, rel­ishes Cat­alo­nia. The South is some­thing of a tourist guide: Katharine walks round the Gothic Quar­ter, when she does not have to take refuge in her hotel be­cause of the men ogling her and po­lice hov­er­ing in this fas­cist Barcelona. Her paint­ing teacher is the real painter, Ramon Ro­gent. She trav­els with her lover, the an­ar­chist Miguel, to the wild, drunken Patum at Berga; then goes to live in Pal­losa, a near-aban­doned vil­lage in the high Pyre­nees.

Long be­fore Car­los Ruíz Zafón made the Plaça de Sant Felip Neri a stopover point on The Shadow of the Wind walk­ing tour, Tóibín has Kather­ine dis­cover this hid­den square near Barcelona's cathe­dral.

“I felt as though I had found the place I had been look­ing for: the sa­cred core of the world, a de­serted square reached by two nar­row al­ley­ways.”

It is a mo­ment of rev­e­la­tion, that she, the new ar­rival, feels sud­denly at home in a strange place. This promise of change, the pos­si­bil­ity of a fu­ture in a new coun­try, is a feel­ing many long-term for­eign res­i­dents have ex­pe­ri­enced.

Colm Tóibín, 60 years old now, is one of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world's lead­ing nov­el­ists and in­tel­lec­tu­als, writ­ing widely on lit­er­a­ture, Catholi­cism and gay rights. He grew up in the small town of En­nis­cor­thy, in County Wex­ford, Ire­land, source and site of much of his writ­ing. In the 25 years since The South was pub­lished, he has writ­ten seven other nov­els, two short-story col­lec­tions and sev­eral non-fic­tion books, in­clud­ing Homage to Barcelona (1990).

His con­nec­tion with Cat­alo­nia is strong and en­dur­ing. He came to live in Barcelona in 1975: there is a fine de­scrip­tion of his own dis­cov­ery of sex­ual free­dom in a city just emerg­ing from the dic­ta­tor­ship in one of the sto­ries in his col­lec­tion, The Empty Fam­ily (2010). He lived later other pe­ri­ods in the city and in a Pyre­nean vil­lage.

His nov­els in­clude The Mas­ter (2004) on Henry James's art and sup­pressed sex­u­al­ity, The Black­wa­ter Light­ship (1999) on how a fam­ily in con­flict copes with De­clan who is dying of AIDS and The Story of the Night (1996), a thriller on gay life under the 1970s Ar­gen­tine dic­ta­tor­ship. Brook­lyn (2009) deals with a young woman's 1930s em­i­gra­tion to New York.

These are Tóibín's ha­bit­ual themes: grief and con­flict in the fam­ily, po­lit­i­cal and sex­ual op­pres­sion, and em­i­gra­tion from a poor and back­ward Ire­land and then the pull of the coun­try back again. All in a sober, in­tense style, with short sen­tences and si­lences that Tóibín urges read­ers to hear.