Narrative Voice: Moment Of Clarity

Montreal Gazette Dept: Toibin has been quite upfront about his admiration for Henry James. The Master, his 2004 novel, audaciously made James himself its protagonist; in the new collection, James makes a cameo in one story and is name-checked in another. But this is no case of flattery by imitation. Rather, Toibin has internalized some key Jamesian traits -an affinity for the peripatetic outsider, a preoccupation with cross-cultural tensions and social ritual, a disdain for neat genre boundaries, a narrative voice so finely honed that the smallest of variations has dramatic import -and applied them to his own quite contemporary set of concerns, according to Montreal Gazette. You can almost hear Dublin collectively saying, "well, excuse us," and sure enough, Frances's disdain is seen to be rooted in an unresolved relationship whose ghosts flit about the city and strictly speaking, almost nothing happens in the title story of Colm Toibin's new collection. A woman returns from California to the Irish home of her youth, looks out to sea through a telescope, experiences a moment of clarity, finds a brightly coloured stone on the beach. And that's pretty much it. The old "show, don't tell" edict beloved of creative writing teachers could hardly be more flouted. Yet such is the writer's command that we're left in no doubt that another common commandment of fiction has been met: the protagonist leaves the story fundamentally changed from the way she came in. Broadly speaking, a Toibin protagonist will be of a certain age and professional standing, at a point in life where the ballast of family and community is somehow falling away, grappling with the fallout of a defining event that is often far in the past, returning to old haunts only to find that things aren't what they used to be. A fair representative would be Frances, in the story Two Women. A prominent Hollywood set designer, she is back in Ireland for the first time in decades to work on a film shoot, and she's less than enamoured of what she sees: "The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better stores in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her." As reported in the news.
@t genre boundaries, colm toibin