Mothers and Sons
Colm Tóibín Picador, 310pp, £12.99
ISBN 0330441825
Conventionally, the lot of an Irish mother is to talk into a void. This is the subtext of the old joke about how many native housewives it takes to change a light bulb ("Don't mind me; I'll sit in the dark"), and it's been a staple trope of Irish literature at least since Stephen Dedalus refused to pray beside his mother's deathbed. Tradition insists that everything depends on not telling "the mammy" a thing, while a modern cliché contends that this culture of silence will be the source, in time, of some debilitating regret: the "mute secret words" (as Joyce put it) uttered by the dead mother's ghost. Colm Tóibín's measured and humane short stories are concerned not only with what familial Irish silence might hide - a well-rehearsed litany of abuse, corruption, misogyny, covert sex and the corrosive tedium of loveless duty - but with the uses, too, of saying nothing at all. Silence, Tóibín suggests, might also be a mother's secret weapon.
The collection starts with an unlikely source of insight into what is said and unsaid at the domestic heart of a culture. In "The Use of Reason", a harried Dublin gangster regards the city as "a great emptiness", considers how best to dispose of some stolen Rembrandts (including a portrait of an old woman) and discovers that his mother has been drunkenly indiscreet to an undercover policeman. In an echo of Endgame, the gangster longs for the universe simply to shut up: "He would be happy if everything were dark and empty . . . if there was no sound at all in the world and no one living to make any sound, just this stillness and almost perfect silence." But mothers, it seems, insist on talking, and being talked to: in "A Priest in the Family", an old woman finds that she is the last to know that her son has been charged with abusing children. She refuses to be ushered out of the way for her own good, and simply carries on speaking.
Such studies might risk sounding like a restricted sociology of recent Irish scandal, were it not for the specificity and subtlety of Tóibín's address. His stories present lives that are assuredly circumscribed by silence, by individual and collective cowardice. But things are never quite so straightforward. In "A Song", a young man happens upon the mother he has not seen for 19 years, singing in a provincial pub. The whole scene - the crowd, the drink, the harmony he imagines between their two voices - conspires to suggest that they will acknowledge each other, but he slips away before it happens, having learned too well from her skill at absconding. Mothers and Sons is all about this uncertain inheritance: secrecy and shame might (maybe accidentally) skip a generation; they might as easily settle in for decades.
In perhaps the most successful story in the collection, Tóibín gives us a mother whose silence and cunning are essential to her survival. In "The Name of the Game", a recent widow, Nancy, discovers the full extent of her late husband's secrecy: the supermarket that they ran together is on the brink of bankruptcy. Nancy resolves to save herself and her children by opening a chip shop. Tóibín's particular skill here is to describe a character whose desire to escape the confines of a crabbed and furtive community has blinded her to her own failure to speak to her son: he, it turns out, wants nothing more, literally, than a quiet life. This sense of mothers and sons misreading one another's silence pervades the stories: elsewhere, the mother of an apparently loving and dutiful grandson cannot say whether he grieves for her dead mother or is relieved to be rid of a burdensome responsibility.
Tóibín himself is at his most eloquent at such ambiguous moments: as when, in "A Journey", a mother drives her depressed son - "suffering from silence" - home from hospital; her husband has recently suffered a stroke, and she catches "a glimpse of a future in which she would need to muster every ounce of selfishness she had". Tóibín is for the most part a reticent stylist, not much given to making the paradoxes that exercise his stories resonate too loudly at the level of his own prose. This can make at times for a disappointingly flat reading experience - this is, for example, a book that consistently uses music as a metaphor for the tension between expression and restraint, but rarely, if ever, lets us know what that music sounds or feels like. But at his best, Tóibín tactfully transforms the venerable theme of the meaning of Irish motherhood, and the even more elemental national obsession with the ethics of speech, into a set of stories with precise, assured and lasting significance.
Brian Dillon's memoir "In the Dark Room" is out in paperback (Penguin). He is working on "Tormented Hope: nine hypochondriac lives"
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