It’s Dublin on a rainy Autumnal afternoon, and Colm Tóibín is serenading me over the teacups. He’s singing some notes in dulcet Bass tones to demonstrate how, during the audition for a Catholic Church choir in New York, he had to lower his voice from its natural tenor.
That wasn’t all. He travelled to London for a day, rehearsing, then singing The German Requiem. He joined a second choir, and had two singing teachers, but he’s given it all up now.
“I just did it all for research – it was for the book,” he says. And when I ask him, doesn’t he miss it, he looks bemused. And he repeats, “It was just for the book.” But I can’t help thinking that’s it’s shame for him; not to mention the waste of a great voice.
The book – Nora Webster, has been a long time in the writing. Tóibín started it back in 2000, when he was writing The Master. Brooklyn came out of it; he’s written two collections of short stories and The Testament of Mary – and all the time he was trying to find a way to get the new novel into shape.
Set in the town Tóibín’s grew up in, Enniscorthy, Nora Webster shows a new widow coping with her grief, as she tries to find a way to live with her new reality. Inspired by his mother’s story, it’s more than a little autobiographical.
When Tóibín was in sixth class in school, his father died, suddenly. Six months later he moved into the secondary school where his father had been a much-respected teacher. Sitting in those classrooms, was a constant remainder to the young boy of what he had lost.
“But I never articulated it,” he says. “I never said it, but I moved from being in the middle of things to sitting on my own at the back. I just withdrew and the teachers began to hate me. I was doing a mixture of being really cheeky and very lazy. And they knew I thought I was smarter than they were, which I did. And I am. And I hated them. I used to go home on my own. Somebody should have noticed it, but nobody did.
In the book, Tóibín is represented by Donal, the third child of the family, who withdrew into himself and developed a stutter. He becomes obsessed with photography.
Nora Webster, Tóibín agrees, is the book he always had to write. But he couldn’t have done it as a new author.
Nora Webster is a quiet book that slowly draws the reader in, then keeps them there, hanging on every word. A wonderful depiction of a rural town, the tone is utterly different to the passionate one found in the Story of the Night or The Testament of Mary.
Is it hard changing in style, from passion to quietness?
I found myself increasingly drawn to the character of Nora; yet in many ways she is not a sympathetic character. She’s prickly to her sisters, and finds the traditional visits of neighbours both irritating and intrusive. She doesn’t take much notice of her children’s grief, and it’s clear that she had always been considered somewhat difficult.
Then, thinking of Nora, he laughs.
There’s a nun in Nora Webster, who seems almost too saintly to be true. It’s as if she stepped out of a Maeve Binchy novel, but Tóibín assures me that she is very firmly rooted in reality.
Looking at Tóibín’s life; at his teaching of English in Columbia University; his houses in Dublin, Wexford, New York and Spain, it strikes me that he has the best lifestyle of any writer. But he fervently disagrees, saying he could take me through any number of writers who have better lives than he. He swears New York can be a dull place, and is one he is often anxious to leave. And that he would prefer a calm happy life in County Wexford.
He cites Sebastian Barry; a man he admires personally, and as a writer.
As one of Ireland’s greatest writers, does it bother Tóibín that, after being three times shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, he has yet to win it?
“Being on the shortlist that first time – with the Blackwater Lightship, made huge difference to everything. Instead of being a slightly sad Irish guy I became someone who could actually be successful; but the prize night was something that people should not have to go through.
So he feels maybe, Nora Webster could finally crack it for him?