The Blackwater Lightship - Reviews

Aids memoire - Mark Lawson November 9 1999

In a literary equivalent to the twinning of cities, many authors psychologically add the name of a great foreign talent to the sign on their study door: Barnes/Flaubert, Amis/Bellow, Rushdie/Márquez and Grass. In late-20th-century Ireland, the twinning committee seems to receive most requests for Chekhov. William Trevor, John McGahern and Brian Friel have all found common ground, and the fourth novel from Colm Toibin might have been called Three Women. Even its actual title - The Blackwater Lightship - feels Chekhovian in its use of a detail from the landscape for symbolic poignancy.

The identification makes sense. In Ireland at the century's end - as in Russia at the century's beginning - tight rural communities try to ignore the shifts in the cities, and the past is haunted by the future. The old cling to ritual. The young dream of escape.

In the Booker-shortlisted The Blackwater Lightship, three generations of women from the same family - Helen, a young married woman, her mother Lily and granny Dora - have come to a bruised truce after decades of dissent. They are forced together in a crumbling old house (Chekhov, again) to nurse Helen's brother, Declan, brought to his final days by Aids. Two gay friends of Declan's are also in attendance.

Tóibín's main business in the novel seems to be the denial of expectation. He has deliberately written neither the default gay novel (polemical and operatic) nor the required Irish one (superstition, bigotry, whimsy).

Stereotypes of Irish life and fiction might lead us to expect the arrival of a priest at Declan's bedside howling about sodomites, but he never comes. Similarly, granny Dora, informed of Declan's condition, doesn't weep and Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph but nods wisely. She's seen all about it on the big television in the corner. Nor is the high comedy that is possible in the collision between rural Irish women and three gay men ever delivered.

Irish writers - like those in South Africa - are forced to endure a reading between the lines for political meaning. Although Tóibín's scheme is almost entirely domestic, you find yourself worrying that the pivotal situation - warring family in uneasy peace comes together to accept differences - is intended as a wider metaphor or message.

Certainly the novel speaks up for tolerance and acceptance but - fittingly yet irritatingly - does so in a whisper. Nor do the sentences ever shout about themselves. Tóibín renounces thesaurus, word-play, fancy phrasing. (Another of the book's denials of expectations, perhaps: rejecting Joyce as a model of Irish writing.)

You can see why it pleased a committee. Unlike bigger books omitted by the Booker panel, it's almost flawless as far as it goes: elegant, honourable, believable. The only possible objection concerns the sins of omission. For me, his earlier The Heather Blazing better balanced the private and the public, honed prose and narrative interest. The Blackwater Lightship is a disquietingly muffled book and Tóibín's admirers may regret that, because of the Booker, this one will produce the most noise.