Colm Tóibín’s sounds of silence
“It is hard to know who we are. The dead have gone from us; that much is true,” says a grieving character in The News from Dublin, who, awash with the pain of a recently dead brother, also lingers over a long-lost lover. “But grieving is too strong a word. I do not know what the word is. Maybe there is not a single word, not a stable word.” Other people can seem, to the often singular men and women in Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short stories, even harder to grasp than their own feelings. And there’s very little by way of grasping going on. Turning away is much preferred but not always an option.
A plumber in the Bay Area needs help locating his estranged partner and never-met daughter. He talks about it reluctantly. “Paul told his companions that he had a daughter. None of them responded. If one of them had said even a word, or expressed surprise in any way, he was sure he would have said nothing more.” A good-Samaritan bar owner wants to come to the help of Irish men who live on their own. “‘Well, that’s me summed up,’ Paul said, before realising that he should have said nothing.” Years later when his daughter complains about her mother to Paul, “he could wallow in the luxury of saying nothing”.
What his characters feel in silence, Colm Tóibín tends to render exquisitely plain though never simple. In the title story, set in the 1940s, Maurice, whose younger brother has late-stage tuberculosis, goes from Enniscorthy to Dublin to find out if a minister can help procure a new drug that’s been in the news. Back home, he doesn’t want to face his family, imagines the sick brother as “a ghost trailing behind him, hovering in the darkening air, a solitary figure asking him if there was any news, if there was any hope”.
In “The Journey to Galway”, a woman has just been handed that long-dreaded telegram about the death of her son in the First World War (she is based on Lady Gregory, the Irish writer and dramatist whom Tóibín portrayed anew in Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush and in an earlier, powerfully carnal short story called “Silence”). Here the lady finds her life rent in two but in her, again, that urge to avoid others. She wishes the task of giving the terrible news to her daughter-in-law and grandchildren had fallen on someone else. Young Dan in “A Sum of Money”, guilty of a misdemeanour, waits for the showdown with his parents, then realises “his father and his mother did not know what to say. They were almost embarrassed. If he relaxed now, he felt, if he did not speak, if he stood up quietly and casually, as though it were natural, and went to his own room across the hall… then no one might follow him.”
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There’s great power coiled into these held-back responses to the world. Now in his seventies, Tóibín is getting sparer, more crystalline, losing everything that might have the faintest whiff of sentimentality. Some of the stories in his previous collection, The Empty Family, also often about loners, can seem chatty in contrast. By way of just one example, a man at JFK airport is comforted by the sight of his travelling fellow Irish, describing to himself at length their body language and get-up. In this book, a similar man, also leaving JFK for Dublin, only thinks of how every Irish person feels release when the flight takes off and “some, like me, also know it does not last for long”.
But haunting all this spareness is a troubled beauty. A dead or dying brother appears in three stories, lovers leave or die, parents can be remote from their children. And although there are Spanish characters in the book too, one takes the unspeaking quality for an Irish trait. That man on the plane to Dublin finds, on visiting his old haunts, that people behave differently now. There is shouting and laughter at a restaurant he’s in. “I think about the city I used to know, which was a place that specialised in the half-said thing, the shrug, a place where people looked at one another out of the corner of their eye. All that is over now…”
Henry James, the subject of Tóibín’s celebrated novel The Master, once said, “I have the imagination of disaster – and see life as ferocious and sinister.” In these stories characters don’t live with high hopes, of course, but they appear to be held in a stilled interlude between those disastrous climes of the past and what’s to come. It is a pause of the sort James’s contemporary EM Forster described, one in which people might be intellectually creative or just familial, short stretches some thought of as “decadence” and he called “civilisation”. On either side, the “ultimate reality” of societal violence.
Even in those stories in this collection set in the past, there’s a sense that the big battles are, for now, over. Lady Gregory sees herself working not for Irish freedom but for what “would come afterwards, the struggle to build on the freedom”. Marta, a woman living a quiet life in 1990s Spain, is approached by a lover from the Civil War years, who later became one of Franco’s generals. The affair was the zenith of her life, yet she wants nothing to disturb her present peace. In “Sleep”, the character who finds Dublin changed is asked by his German partner at the beginning if he hates the British: “I say that I do not. All that is over now. It is easy to be Irish these days.” In this contemporary moment it is, further, possible to be gay without furtiveness, although the same man remembers a time when it wasn’t: “But no one cares now, in this apartment building or in the world outside, that we are men and we wake often in the same bed.”
This very atmosphere of restraint, measured joy, wordless grief is all over the story placed at the heart of the book. Here, too, we’re inside the head of an attractively low-key character, although he turns out to be a schoolteacher recently released after a ten-year prison sentence for the repeated sexual abuse of young boys. Tóibín tests the reader’s sympathies here by separating the “evil” Joe is seen to represent from the “confusions” in his mind. But the man’s main concern is control – never to let on about how he’s actually feeling.
Where lie the limits of that Forsterian decadence? Joe’s fellow inmates in prison were all sexual offenders, some Catholic priests among them. They’re incorrigibly quotidian and don’t behave as though they have crossed a line. Maybe they felt shame and guilt, “but as far as Joe could see, they each had a great distracting topic or obsession – as banal, say, as the excessive noise that came from the prison heating system, or the failure to provide a proper breakfast some days…”
Likewise, Tóibín succeeds in coming tenderly close to Joe’s ordinary need to stop being hounded, to live. From Dublin he escapes to Barcelona where he buys himself an apartment. “At about four o’clock in the afternoon the front part of his living room filled with sunlight. He could open the balcony door, move the armchair and sit in the mild heat reading a book on his Kindle.” Greatly alluring, this cusp, but one also sees that it’s a terminus. The obsessive inwardness Tóibín upholds reaches the dead end of pure selfishness.
Joe only wants to be left alone but his refuge is threatened as are, sometimes, those that other characters seek. Those exhibitive people in Dublin signify a shift; so does the image of an adolescent with adult airs scrolling obsessively on her phone. And then there are Ice and IRS men closing in on immigrants in the United States. It may be time to brace oneself for the next stage – of civilisation or, more likely, its opposite.
Anjum Hasan’s most recent novel is “History’s Angel” (Bloomsbury)
The News from DublinColm TóibínPicador, 272pp, £20
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[Further reading: The Rasputin legend]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
