Portrait of Colm Toibin

Hard road to instant success Colm Toibin's ride to literary greatness may appear a smooth one, but the journey there has been filled with dogged determination and a masterplan, writes Angela Long.

It is a peculiar reaction from a man who is not only a seasoned and successful author of both fiction and non-fiction, but also one who has so determinedly sought a wide audience and a prestigious position in the English-language literary firmament.

Tóibín's last novel, The Blackwater Lightship, was short-listed for the 1999 Booker MacConnell prize and is riding high in the best-seller charts. At the same time, his magisterial Penguin hardback Anthology of Irish Literature sits ponderously near the novel in the bookshops of Dublin and London.

Tóibín, in his early 40s, is himself not a ponderous character, but direct and engaging. Of middle height, he is dark but balding, with chunky features, a full mouth. He could be Spanish, his second home, as much as Irish. He comes from Enniscorthy, a pretty town in County Wexford, a couple of hours drive from Dublin; the home environs feature in a number of his books.

He is embarking on his third visit to Australia and is a headliner at the Perth writers' festival, which opened yesterday, and will move on to Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Accompanying him in Perth is Dermot Healy, a friend and another of the end-of-20th-century wave of Irish writers who have had international success. Previous trips to Australia have left their impression on Tóibín, demonstrated by his choice of a painting by the Aboriginal artist, Emily Kngwarreye, who died in 1995.

Many Irishmen have atavistic passion about their home counties, but Wexford people have a special pride. Wexford was the cradle of the 1798 rebellion, the doomed rebellion which was supposed to be assisted by the French. The French failed to turn up and the uprising was predictably crushed by the English, who still ruled the whole of Ireland from Dublin Castle.

Enniscorthy today is prosperous rural Ireland. Mindful that an 80-year-old Australian fan of Tóibín had referred to him as "a naughty boy" - I presumed because of his homosexuality - I asked him what they think of Colm Toibin in Enniscorthy. "If you were a famous hurler [hurling is a popular form of hockey], or involved in the GAA [Gaelic Athletic Association], it would be much more important," he says, frankly. "Things are easygoing. People would never say a thing about it [his homosexuality]. I was on a platform with a bishop there in the town recently, presenting some prizes, and nobody would think about it."

Tóibín went to University College Dublin (UCD) after the Christian Brothers' School in Wexford. Then in 1975 he moved to Spain, where he taught English for several years and received the inspiration for his books, Homage to Barcelona and The South.

In the past six years, his success has increased exponentially. He co-edited the 200 Best Novels of the 20th Century with the legendary Carmen Callil of Virago, contributes frequently to the London Review Books and has published an impressive short pamphlet on the running sore in Irish social consciousness, the Great Famine of the 1840s. Most recently was the Penguin anthology.

He has had what appears a smooth journey to the pre-eminent position he occupies today. Does he feel he's "arrived?" He laughs heartily. "No, I just think I should be working harder, doing more."

It becomes plain in conversation that he is a very hard worker, a very focused person. He describes this focus as coming into full play when he is thinking about the next stage of a book.

"In other things I am a very haphazard and slapdash person, but when it comes to this I am totally serious."

Although he says his novels are not autobiographical, this characteristic is prevalent in all his novels, even in the character of Katherine, the protagonist of his marvellous first novel, The South, who spends much time planning the execution of the vast paintings she creates, living high in the Spanish Pyrenees.

His determination, his masterplan if you like, can be seen in how he got The South published. To understand his achievement it is necessary to know that novel writing is a class-sport among a certain type of Irish person. In the offices of The Irish Times, the main broadsheet newspaper, one cannot throw a typewriter without hitting half a dozen published authors (and if the missile stopped them writing, in some cases, it would be a mercy).

However, only those who know someone in Irish publishing are sure to get that magic publication first time up. Roddy Doyle, now a massive critical and popular success, had to self-publish his first book, The Commitments.

In those dark days of the late 1980s Tóibín wrote to a new and energetic agent in London, Imogen Parker, and outlined his novel, also sending some samples of his Irish journalism. But he was never inclined to settle for Irish publication only.

"She replied by return post," he recalls, still impressed. The novel was a great success, and won a prize for fiction sponsored by the State airline, Aer Lingus. Yet "a lot of people were puzzled by it", he says. "They said who is this guy, why is he writing about Spain, and the 1950s, and a woman."

In fact, Katherine, the main character, is a sort of prototype for Tóibín's often cold, main characters: Eamon in The Heather Blazing, Lily, the mother in The Blackwater Lightship, are all people who seem unable to connect with their nearest and dearest. Were these deliberately dysfunctional characters?

He laughs, but seems embarrassed, puzzled. "[Fellow novelist] John Banville told me he thought Eamon was a weasel. I was quite surprised. I didn't think he was that bad. I suppose all this comes from what I read when I really started reading ... Sartre, Camus, Hemingway. Hemingway's male figures are always dysfunctional ... Those early books really change you. You never read anything again that matters so much. I just thought that was what happened in tragic fiction."

He says he thinks of his characters as "always doing their best, always making an effort". His own favourite of his books is The Story of the Night, set largely in Argentina. "It takes the biggest risks," he says. "The others are very shaped and predetermined." His are quiet, accessible novels, especially compared with the density and difficulty of someone such as Banville.

He is very supportive of his Irish peer group, although says the greatest days have probably gone. Notwithstanding the success of Nobel laureate and recent Whitbread winner, Seamus Heaney, the level is usually more prosaic, now.

"Pressures of some sort in this society produced Joyce and Beckett. There is certainly not anyone like that working here now - I'm not sure there is anywhere," says Tóibín. "The nearest thing might be people like James Kelman in Scotland, or Don de Lillo in the States ... Or even storytelling on a vast scale like Peter Carey in Australia [or New York!].

"What's happening here is much more democratic now: there is a sense of an ordinary reader. Beckett didn't have a sense of an ordinary reader; Joyce didn't, for the very good reason that there wasn't any such thing as an ordinary reader then. The movies have also been hugely influential in the way people write now ...

"There is also a sense in the work of a more settled society than Beckett or Joyce had. And, you have more people working at a level of competence, no-one who wants to change the language like they did."

He frets about the last dozen entries in his anthology, chronologically. "I had a problem with the anthology, and I asked Penguin if we could stop at 1982, but of course they wanted it to look as up-to-date as possible. It seems to me that this fiction now will not have the same resolution ... will it be remembered in 100 years?" He fears that people will "laugh and laugh at the entries for the last 15 years, they'll say he's just included all his mates".

But he is very positive about fellow Irish writers. He admires Roddy Doyle, who he says has managed to blur the distinction between the popular and literary genres, especially in the tale of wife-battering, The Woman Who walked into Doors.

"I pay a lot of attention to what he does," he says. "You get a lot of nourishment here from what other writers are doing, such as the playwright Billy Roche or Sebastian Barry, and some of our poets."

He mentions Pat McCabe, who wrote the black novel filmed by Neil Jordan, The Butcher Boy. "I think that is flawless," Tóibín says. "From the moment it begins it just doesn't let up."

He might seem anxious about not being involved in a specific project at the moment, but it does not sound like the muse will desert him. "Yesterday at about 5 pm, sitting just here, a whole novel occurred to me. It was just unbelievable that it has come in this way. It came so clearly and I understood that I would have to go deep into it and experience a lot of pain."