Published in 2014, this is by Colm Toibin, who's racked up quite a number of posts here in recent years: The Magician (about Thomas Mann); Brooklyn and Long Island (about Irish emigration to the United States); and Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know (about the fathers of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce).

This one had been on the reading list for a bit, but clawed its way to the top purely because it's set in Enniscorthy, just down the road from Gorey, which is where we are right now...



***

The story can be recounted quite briefly, because "story" is not really what this is about.

We open in the late 1960s. The eponymous Nora, still in her mid-forties, has recently been widowed. The novel is an account of how she copes -- or doesn't. It's a detailed examination of what grieving does to you. But it's not written poetically or philosophically. Rather, it describes, incredibly simply, the everyday experience of being a widow. It's understated to the nth degree -- this happens, and then this, just as it does in everyday life -- but the effect is very, very powerful. That's how we do grief, at the end of the day, isn't it? It's not a film running in the background, a thing unto itself. Rather, it seeps into all the colours of our daily routine, leaving everything recognizable, but utterly transformed.

Nora has four children (the two girls, Aine and Fiona, are away, continuing the various phases of their education; the two boys, Donal and Conor, still young, are living at home). Her late husband, Maurice, was a schoolteacher, a highly respected local figure, who provided amply for the family. Nora, like many married women of her day, had no financial incentive to work, and therefore didn't. There was a beach house, out at Cush. They'd done well, the Websters, both rising from backgrounds that were much less affluent.

But now everything is different. Nora needs to sell the beach house. She needs to get a job. And solutions are found, because there are plenty of people in the town looking after her. But they can't stop it hurting. The next holiday will be in a rented caravan. And the job (back where she used to work) puts her under the thumb of the redoubtable Francie Kavanagh, a poster child for every vindictive, petty, power-crazed office manager who ever lived.


Enniscorthy, 2026. "She thought of the freedom that marriage to Maurice had given her, ...the freedom to go into the front room at any time and look out of the window at the street and Vinegar Hill across the valley or the clouds in the sky, letting her mind be idle..."

So, page by page, we watch Nora. Always sympathetically (such an awful thing to have happened to her), and occasionally critically (she's sometimes abrasive, always self-absorbed, never very aware of others and what they're feeling -- and that's not just a result of this terrible thing she's going through, because there are hints that she's always been like that, and it was the genial Maurice, "the love of her life", who smoothed her path for her...).

We watch her deciding to get her hair dyed, and then anxiously wondering what the townsfolk are going to think about that. We watch her standing up to the dreaded Francie (with a little intervention from her friends), and making up her mind to join the union, and going all tiger mom when her son is unjustly demoted at school. We watch her being introduced to singing lessons and the Gramophone Club (bringing her into a milieu that Maurice and his family have always scorned, but allowing her musical capacities to open out like a flower).

These are all positive things. And they're real. But such victories can't conceal that Nora is still a storm-battered sea bird, tossed about on an ocean of grief.


"The sea was rougher than she ever remembered it... Here there were sand dunes and the long strand, no stones, no shelter, no cliffs made of marl..." This is Arklow, but it's the same kind of feel...

Towards the end of the book, she gets quite ill. In a stupor of medicine and tiredness and pain, and after a prolonged, insomniac memory of the vigil she held over the dead body of her mother (with whom she'd never had a great relationship), she has an "encounter" with Maurice. It's both rationally explicable (moody music, stress, sleeplessness...) and shiveringly haunting:

"'Maurice, can you speak? Can you say something?'
"He gave her the shy smile he had, curling his lip.
"'The music's sad,' he whispered.
"'Yes, the music is sad,' she said. 'But not always.'
"'Sister Thomas,' he said. His voice was fainter now.
"'Yes, she prays for us every day. She found me on the strand at Ballyvaloo.'
"He nodded.
"'I felt you were there, but not for long. That's the only time.'
"'I know.'
"His voice was softer than she had ever heard it...
"'Will we be all right? I don't know if we will be all right.'
"He did not reply..."

He won't confirm that Conor will be "all right". And he refers to "the other one". Neither she nor we know who he means by "the other one".

Her Aunt Josie assures her it was all a dream. But Nora won't countenance this explanation, insisting he was there:

"She began to rock back and forth, crying. 'If I could be with him --'
"'What did you say?'
"'If I could be with him, that's what I said.'"

Poor Nora. All her efforts. All her successes. And yet that fundamental fucker of human existence is going to mark her for the rest of her life. It must be so tempting to just give up.

Josie, brisk and practical as usual, gives her some stuff to help her sleep, and urges her to do what we all find most difficult: "See what's there." There's a lot that Nora hasn't really been seeing. Her children's grief, for one.


Donal buries his grief by plunging into photography

***

Josie encourages her to let other family members dispose of Maurice's clothes, still hanging in the wardrobe. While they're doing that, they find a box of letters, which they hand to Nora:

"All of Maurice's letters to her in the years before they married were there. She had kept them in the box, locked away. She remembered how shy his tone was when he wrote to her. The letters were often short, just suggesting a place in the town where they might meet, and a time.

"She did not have to look at them; she knew them. He often talked about himself as though he were someone else, saying that he had met a man who had told him how fond he was of a certain girl, or how he had a friend who walked home from seeing his girlfriend and all he thought was how much he would like to see her again soon, or how he would like to go to Ballyconnigar with her and walk along the cliffs at Cush and maybe have a swim with her if the weather was good.

"She knelt down and slowly fed the letters into the fire. She thought about how much had happened since they were written and how much they belonged to a time that was over now and would not come back. It was the way things were; it was the way things had worked out."

And that's how the book ends.

This is how you write grief. Not histrionically. Just terribly, terribly simply and sadly.



***

Some readers criticize the plainness of the style. And it's true that, apart from the occasional narrative bounces -- Donal's stammer seems to get worse when Aunt Josie appears (what don't we know?); Aine, now politically involved, briefly goes missing just when the "Troubles" are taking hold (will she be OK?); Nora gets sick (might she actually die?) -- the course of the book is one fairly ordinary thing after another. And yet it works. Tessa Hadley unpacks how:

"In less sure hands, these simplicities... could become banal; ordinary life seems banal until it has gone, then it becomes the past and has extraordinary power to move us. This writer's withholding -- of commentary, of explication, of any verdict, on the life he renders -- is so striking that it's almost an inverted extravagance in itself. And the withholding is as intrinsic to the whole feel of the novel as the quality of light is intrinsic in a painting; it's also part of the novel's mimetic truth to life. There is no explication adequate to what has happened -- a man is dead before his time, his family is stricken. If this experience has any meaning, it can only be opaque and deeply hidden; a writing that found its meaning easily would be suspect, fake. Yet every so often the novel's austere reserve does crack open, and to powerful effect. Nora watches the film Gaslight on television with her sons and thinks that Ingrid Bergman's performance 'evoked something hidden and strange, as Maurice's absence, his body in a grave, must seem hidden and strange to the boys'. Or, after singing The Last Rose of Summer, 'it came to her how they would all take their turn in the world, shadows within shadows, as Maurice had done and her mother had done'. This is richly beautiful precisely because it's so hard-won."


Another condolence visit: "It's the little woman who lives in Court Street..." Actually, it's May Lacey, mother of Eilis Lacey from Brooklyn/Long Island

***

The novel is dedicated to Toibin's mother, Brid (1921-2000), and his younger brother, Niall (1959-2004). It clearly reflects elements of Toibin's own life. His father, also a teacher, died young, in 1967, the same year as Maurice. Toibin was 12, roughly the age Donal is in the story. Like Donal, he developed a stammer about this time.

Like Donal and his brother, says Kathy Sheridan, Toibin was dropped off "with relatives a long way from home, while Brid vanished for months to be with their ailing father in a Dublin hospital, during which they never heard a word from her... The emotionally distant mother who virtually abandons her small children with relatives became a recurring character in his fiction; now she re-emerges as Nora Webster."

Sheridan's tone is probably a bit crisper than Toibin's own. Asked "did he ever have it out with this mother", he replies, "I think you have a duty to be immensely polite to your parents, especially when they're getting older and you're getting older and you won't have them forever." His mother remained, says Sheridan, "emotionally distant and nontactile" to the end, but they "navigated a lively, rewarding adult bond through literature and classical music and good manners. And by never mentioning the unmentionable."

But Toibin also admits, "Everything changed when my father died. I could never really manage that. I suppose every kid is different, but I could never handle that." Like Donal, he was having to sit in classrooms that constantly reminded him of the man he'd lost. It overwhelmed him.

Nora Webster is a novel. Nevertheless, Toibin says: "Some of it is autobiographical down to the tiniest detail, but I am the only one who knows that now, because everyone else is dead." I'm imagining that the wackier the incident, the more likely it is to be true...

Perhaps because of this intimacy, the book took a long time to gestate. He started it in 2000, while he was writing The Master. But it stewed very slowly. "For a decade," says Toibin, "I thought about the book at some point every day. I worked out a structure. Slowly, the character of Nora Webster herself began to emerge for me more clearly. I wanted her to be both brave and difficult, to be someone fiercely loyal to her children when there was a crisis, but oddly nonchalant in the ordinary course of events. Her sisters were afraid of her. There is a sense of her as trapped by her circumstances, in a small town. In 2006, as I read over the first chapter, I found the story that became the novel Brooklyn in a few sentences in the first few pages. I stopped writing Nora Webster and wrote Brooklyn." More books followed, and short stories. "It seemed in all these books that I was circling the story that was Nora Webster's, working out ways of writing about family and loss and trauma." But he knew he needed to write THIS story. "One Saturday in September 2013 I finished the book. I knew that while I had perhaps opened up this world for readers, I had closed it for myself. I would, I imagined, not come back to it again."

Enniscorthy is Toibin's home town, so that bit's autobiographical too. All four grandparents were born there. It's where his parents got to know each other: "My mother remembered standing at the door of her family house in Court Street in Enniscorthy -- it must have been 1936 -- and seeing a young man on a bicycle and discovering that he was home from university where he was studying Latin."

As he testifies: "Our house and the streets of the town and the coast nearby operate in the novel almost as characters. I did not have to do any research to establish them. It was their resonance, their emotional contours, that interested me."



***

Nora is an intriguing character, and if she's a version of his mother, she has certainly been drawn by a compassionate, insightful observer.

Bereaved, she has had to steel herself not to feel anything, to soldier on. But as we've said, she seems oblivious to her children's struggles to process grief -- and indeed to almost everything else about their lives. People either adopt their own parents' style, or reject it -- depending on how positively or negatively they come to evaluate the way they were raised. And yet the style YOU wanted might not at all be the style your child wants... In this case, Nora had a bad relationship with her overbearing mother, so she tries to do things differently: "She had trained herself not to ask any of the children too many questions." The result is that the boys talk to their Aunt Margaret far more than they talk to her... This is not, we suspect, just a function of their recent bereavement. We have several examples where the boys withhold information on minor matters.

She prides herself on controlling her grief in front of the boys. But that leaves them with nowhere to go with their own feelings. All three watch the movie Shangri-La together, and Nora notices that Donal starts to shift uncomfortably when the hero wants to go back to "the paradise where he would not grow old". She reflects: "The message in this was so obvious that Nora did not have to wonder what the boys were thinking about, they were thinking that this was what their father had done. She was thinking it too, and it registered the same for all of them, she thought, so that when it was over, there was no need to mention it. They turned the television off and she set about preparing dinner for the next day while the boys went to bed." How many human tragedies have been born from the idea that something is "so obvious" that there's "no need to mention it"...?

Nora's generation was never much for expressing feelings, and it's touching to see how music becomes the route to allowing herself to feel emotion. Not just grief, but also wonder, regret, yearning:

"What she had told no one, because it was too strange, was how much this music had come to stand for. It was her dream-life, a life she might have had if she had been born elsewhere. She allowed herself to live for a time each day in a pure fantasy in which she could have learned the cello as a child and then been photographed as this young woman was, eager and talented and in full possession of her world, with men beside her who depended on her to come in with her deeper, darker sound. It almost made her wince in embarrassment when she thought of her own mornings in Gibney's working with figures and dockets and invoices, and her own morning walk across the town, and her own return home each day, and how meagre were the things she looked forward to, and how far these were from a recording studio, a concert platform, a name that was known, how far from the spirited authority of this young woman's playing. She wondered if she was alone in having nothing in between the dullness of her own days and the sheer brilliance of this imagined life."

There are a few things in Nora that remind me of my own mother. She was the one who taught me to like classical music. She had no expertise, and her taste ranged only as far as the "popular" classics. She'd not had a Gramophone Club to coach her. But she was obviously moved by music. I wonder if it made her, too, think of a possible alternative existence.



***

Swirling in the background of this very private tragedy are the "Troubles". A peaceful protest in Derry broken up with lethal force; the British Embassy in Dublin burnt down; references to the various wings of the IRA.

Robert McCrum points out the cleverness of this linkage: "The drumbeat of the Troubles... is so cleverly braided into the widowhood of Nora Webster and her two boys... that Toibin's considerable narrative gifts successfully navigate the bumpy intersection of the private and the public. Through the slow personal reawakening of Webster, he finds a subtle way to reflect on Ireland's need to put its own grief into a larger context... When, in the closing pages, Webster burns her late husband's letters because 'they belonged to a time that was over now', Toibin's message is clear. The past is another country. Better to be an exile from regret. The only way for things to 'work out', a recurrent phrase, is to move forward, boats against the current."



***

The song Nora chose for her first meeting with Laurie, her singing teacher, was The Last Rose of Summer. How very apt:

'Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone
No flow'r of her kindred
No rose bud is nigh
To reflect back her blushes
And give sigh for sigh

I'll not leave thee thou lone one
To pine on the stem
Since the lovely are sleeping
Go sleep thou with them
Thus kindly I scatter
Thy leaves o'er the bed
Where thy mates of the garden
Lie scentless and dead

So soon may I follow
When friendships decay
And from love's shining circle
The gems drop away
When true hearts lie wither'd
And fond ones are flown
Oh! who would inhabit
This bleak world alone
This bleak world alone