- A Guest At The Feast, by Colm Toibin. Picador, $35
Analysts and observers and professional inhabitants of the world of non-fiction regularly have a go at writing fiction. They might do so for wish fulfilment (for Hillary Clinton as for Boris Johnson) or a desire to expand their range - in themes, expressions, maybe even profitability. If Lee Child can sell millions of copies ... A liberating freedom from possible defamation actions could also provide an impetus.
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Why, though, would a successful novelist choose to write essays, reviews or articles? The answer is supplied in the new book by Colm Toibin, an Irish author who has published many excellent novels and one outstanding one (The Heather Blazing). This collection of 11 articles is Toibin's 10th venture into non-fiction, as compared with the 12 novels bearing his name. The focus of his attention will be familiar to any reader of any of those 22 books. Toibin here deals with religion, truth, motives, being and invention, the last connoting creativity.
The first essay alone re-pays the cost of the book many times over. "Cancer: My Part in its Downfall" leads off wryly and deftly: "It all started with my balls". Toibin then develops a witty, brave and reflective account of dealing with cancer. Health staff are rightly praised: "They made the future seems manageable and bearable". The reader is let into secrets not merely about the mess on Toibin's floor ("condoms still living in hope") but also techniques of resisting disease by "lying on the sofa, staring straight ahead".
Toibin then sets aside his own story to focus on his mother, being "deliciously unfair" to a bullying teacher or handing around banned books in a version of "samizdat Irish-style". Lyricism intrudes in describing a house at the coast, "a place of gentle tides and soft gradations and marly clay and white sand".
Toibin moves on to examine the treatment of homosexuality in the Ireland of his youth, growing up "to have every moment of your life shrouded by what is forbidden and what must be secretive". Toibin is extremely brisk in criticism of what he construes as careerism and conformism on the part of the Pope. After that, three writers are subjected to exacting if more generous scrutiny, from the "feline serenity" of Francis Stuart to the "well-stocked mind" of Marilynne Robinson and the "self-enclosed world" of John McGahern.
Conventionally, we claim that good readers make good writers. Conversely, good writers with well-stocked minds can make especially good - intense, intricate, involved - readers. Like Toibin, such writers can look subtly at nuances and inflections, then see through pretence or verbiage. To borrow a Toibin phrase, their best commentary might amount to "placing a halo around ordinary speech".
