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Good Reading : May 2004
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author profile But all Tóibín’s novels are steeped in the Jamesian tech- nique of centring a narrative upon a single point of view. As he explains, ‘What happens is that slowly a reader enters into the spirit of the all-seeing, all-knowing “I”, of not the writer but the main character. James created that idea of the centrality of an “I” within a novel at its most intense.That person might miss things, but no-one else has that central consciousness.’ Tóibín was aware that he had little in common with his subject, despite being the second son, like James, in a family of five, and sharing the calling of a novelist. But Tóibín, 49, was comforted by the fact that James, like himself, was bald. ‘He’s a great bald hero, James,’ enthuses Tóibín. ‘He’s one of the great bald role models. I’d rather have Henry James than, say, John Malkovich.’ He also shares with James a chronic restlessness and a pen- chant for country-hopping, his persistent yearning to wander Europe. Like James,Tóibín often pens chapters of his books in the hotel rooms of foreign cities. Scenes from The Master were composed during trips to Florence, Spain and Crete. Much of The Blackwater Lightship was written in the decrepit cottage in the mountainous heights of the Spanish Pyrenees he bought twelve years ago and has since gradually made habitable. It is the same isolated ruin to which Katherine, the protagonist of The South, retreats after absconding from her family in Dublin. Tóibín was raised in the town of Enniscorthy,Wexford – the landscape to which he has most persistently returned in his novels.With an upbringing deeply steeped in Catholicism, Tóibín was educated at the Christian Brothers’ School in Wexford until his mid-teens, an experience he recounts with gleeful extravagance. ‘It was very dull and they were very dull people,’ recalls Tóibín. ‘It wasn’t just that they beat you, which they did, but that they were just dull. A dreadful, dreadful dull - ness.You were brought up to be dull. It was woebegone.’ His father died when he was twelve, prompting his mother to seek employment and his older three sisters to leave home. ‘I just blocked,’ he confides. ‘I didn’t even know the word block but whatever I did I didn’t feel it. So I sort of froze. It was a strange time; one June we were all there, and when I went back to school in September he was dead, my sisters had gone.This was the time before children had keys, but I had a key then, and I came home to an empty house.’ It was then that he first began to read, filling the void left by his absent family with books. Shortly after, he started to write poetry. The protagonists of his novels are fixed in emotional deadlocks, besieged by memories of a parent’s death or early impressions of abandonment and loss. Toibin considers his novels ‘entirely Freudian [for] the way in which childhood things are taken as fully meaningful … the bruises offered by parents as things that travel right through the books.’ After completing his BA at University College, Dublin, Tóibín headed to Barcelona, where he taught English for three years. He says, ‘I wasn’t exactly fleeing from the terrible darkness ‘The scene utterly fascinated me. This private, solitary, very sensitive individual being actually howled at by the audience. I really wanted to open with that.’ goodreading 23 Photo: Perry Ogden
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