The Story of The Night - Reviews
Colm Toibin, an Irish novelist and journalist with an abiding interest in history, religion and Spanish culture (``Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe,'' ``The South''), does a magnificent job of rendering a consummate outsider as a drifting, yearning Everyman in a larger political context. The hero of his exquisitely written ``The Story of the Night'' is an unlikely candidate to be enjoying the high life in macho, fiercely patriotic Argentina. Yet Richard Garay -- a gay, half-Argentine/half- British functionary -- occupies a position of extreme privilege, living in a sleek house with the handsome son of a senator and moving confidently through the diplomatic and business classes of Buenos Aires. In the aftermath of the Falklands War, no less. Richard's acuity and savoir faire have developed from an early awareness of being an English-speaking stranger in his own land, augmented by emotional battery at home. As a child, Richard ``began to see the world as separate from myself, I began to feel that I had nothing to do with anything around me.'' The young boy's widowed, British-born mother, bitter over never having realized dreams of wealth and excitement during her joyless marriage to Richard's hapless Argentine father, lets it be known that she hates the name Ricardo. His homosexuality, revealed to her when he is a young adult and still living in her arid, downtown apartment, elicits an expression of ``utter contempt.'' This familial-bred alienation, beautifully conveyed in Toibin's spare, melancholy prose, has the effect of sharpening the perceptions of the fair-skinned, blond-haired boy, who even without his mother's prejudices would have grown up understanding that in a Latin country he looked different and was raised speaking a foreign language. A tenuous, mutable sense of self becomes a survival technique, ``so that I never had to be a single fully formed person, I could always switch and improvise.'' ``The Story of the Night'' takes place after the Falklands humiliation, with flashbacks to the 1970s and '80s, when a quasi- fascist government waged its ``dirty war'' against leftists, student activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Under military rule, Richard is not the only person to have learned how to lay low. All decent Argentines are discomfitted by a ``strange lack of contact we have with each other.'' ``Maybe it is possible that I could watch someone being dragged away in front of my eyes and not recognize it,'' Richard says of his troubled country. ``We saw nothing, not because there was nothing, but because we had trained ourselves not to see.'' A desperate bleakness hangs over the first part of the book as we hear of Richard's lonely life at home and his debilitating crushes on straight men, including one of his students, Jorge, the arrogant son of an ambitious senator. When the two young men travel to Barcelona, delighted to be somewhere that gives the feeling of ``entering territory you already possessed, rather than trespassing,'' we sense the psychic constriction of their homeland. The uplifting part of the book is reading of Richard's surge in confidence after his language skills -- useful to the senator, who believes Richard to be a link to American financing -- lead him to two Reagan administration operatives, in Argentina to help foster U.S. business interests. With access to power, what had been the timid, shrinking aspects of Richard's personality are seen instead as the valued qualities of prudence and discretion. The company of mercenaries allows him to blossom. He learns how to behave at dinner parties (``The rule was to have no strong opinions and tell no jokes, to talk, if you could, about places, airlines, hotels, cruises''), when to make the crucial phone call and where to find the right person to help close sensitive oil deals. The Ministry of Finance beckons one morning, needing him to look after some investors. With razor-sharp cool, Richard agrees, providing that all parties understand that he will not be working in an official government capacity. ``I may want to work for these guys in the future,'' he reasons. Part of his changing good fortune includes meeting the senator's other son, Pablo, who becomes Richard's lover and the first real soul mate of his life. They know the same language, although this one is instinctual. ``I imagined that he too must have learned strategies,'' he says of Pablo. ``There were things I could say that I knew he would understand . . . but I said nothing because I did not want to say too much.'' Their relationship forms the last third of the book, which despite plot twists that feel predictable in the realm of gay literature, is nevertheless a finely controlled portrayal of passion, grief and grace. Working with such dark, corrosive material, Toibin's best surprise is how much humanity he lends to the story. This book is a fascinating look at a contemporary society and shows how a person's very marginality can be the key to his strength. Dan Levy is a Chronicle reporter. Copyright © sfgate.com
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