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Colm Tóibín
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 The
Blackwater Lightship : A Novel by
Colm Tóibín
In the opening pages of
The Blackwater Lightship, a stranger drives up to Helen
O'Doherty's Dublin house to tell her that her brother Declan is in
the hospital and needs to see her. At his request, she joins him
at the creepy seaside house of their grandmother--where, as
children, they awaited news of their dying father. What's more,
they're not the only guests. Paul and Larry, friends of Declan who
have known about his HIV diagnosis far longer than his family, are
the next to arrive. And then comes Helen's estranged mother Lily,
whom she hasn't seen in years. Still angry over the emotional
abandonment she suffered during her youth, Helen had refused even
to invite Lily to her wedding. Now she must come to terms not only
with the imminent death of her beloved brother but also with her
mother and grandmother--all at once.
Colm Tóibín ( The
Story of the Night) delivers this unsentimental account of
a troubled family in spare but suggestive language. He does allow
his characters a few high-spirited remarks and the occasional
outburst. Otherwise, though, he keeps his tone even, allowing for
the perfect integration of a light, unforced symbolism. For Lily,
broken hopes and dreams are bound up with the Blackwater
Lightship, one of two lighthouses that once stood in the Irish Sea
near Ballyconnigar. As a child, she believed that these would
always be there:
Tuskar was a man and the Blackwater Lightship was
a woman and they were both sending signals to each other and to
other lighthouses, like mating calls. He was forceful and strong
and she was weaker but more constant, and sometimes she began to
shine her light before darkness had really fallen.
For Helen, on the other hand, it was the house
itself that prompted her deepest, happiest fantasies. But now Lily
has sold the property and shattered Helen's dream that "it
would be her refuge, and that her mother, despite everything,
would be there for her and would take her in and shelter her and
protect her. She had never entertained this thought before; now,
she knew that it was irrational and groundless, but nonetheless
... she knew that it was real and it explained everything."
What Declan has done by drawing them all together at Granny's
house is to enact this potent, poignant fantasy. Whether it has
the power to reconstruct his family is another matter, but in any
case, The Blackwater Lightship remains a gripping
narrative, deftly delivered by a master storyteller. --Regina
Marler
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By Belinda McKeon
Excerpt:
Plaza del Pino, Barcelona on a warm Sunday
morning. An Irish woman watches cautiously from the shadows of a
bar as paintings are hung around the square outside. It is 1950,
just before Colm Tóibín’s time; he was born five years later
to a Catholic middle-class family in Enniscorthy, County Wexford.
But it is a city which he knows as well, and a city which, in
1990, he depicted as vividly in his first novel, ‘The South’,
as in his third work of non-fiction, 'Homage to Barcelona', every
bit as vividly as he would later depict his home town, the same
town from which his protagonist, Katherine Proctor, has fled. The
pieces rouse in Katherine something that excites and disturbs her;
she has notions of becoming a painter, and as she explores them
there is a sense that what is being revealed are the depths of an
artistic consciousness not all her own, but part of what went into
the creation of her character: ‘I had been thinking for days
about paint’, she confesses. ‘I had avoided letting anything
form in my mind. I just knew that I wanted to use paint here. I
had known this feeling before and it had always led to intense
disappointment and bitter regret. I was having dreams of paint’.
Perhaps Colm Tóibín had been having dreams of
Katherine Proctor and her difficult journey towards reconciliation
for years before ‘The South’ appeared in 1990; ten years
later, when he talks about his novels he sounds almost like a
mother talking of her children, remembering the time of their
gestation, the things seen while carrying each child, knowing how
this sight shaped its coming to wholeness...
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By Jacob Urup Nielsen
A homepage dedicated to the Irish author Colm Tóibín
and his work. Site includes biographical details,
bibliography, discussion and links to essays, interviews and more.
Excerpt:
Colm Tóibín was born in Ireland in 1955 and
grew up in a Republican family in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford.
He went to Dublin at the age of 17 to study English and History at
University College Dublin. After graduating from UCD he moved to
Spain in 1975 shortly before the death of Franco. In
Barcelona he, very appropriately, taught English at "an
institution called the Dublin School of English". He
lived in Catalonia for three years before returning to Ireland
1978. Recollections of his Spanish years can be read in the
book Homage to Barcelona and may be traced in his first novel The
South...
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By Colm Tóibín
Excerpt:
In March 1992 I received a printed invitation
from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he
had given in Berlin on St Patrick's Day 1941. I wondered, when I
read it, why Francis had sent this. Over the years he had invited
me to several events, but he had never had invitations printed. I
wondered if it was clear to him, as it was to me, that the
invitation was a direct provocation. He was 90 years old; a good
deal of mystery and controversy still surrounded him, his
political opinions, his novels and, especially, the fact that he
had spent the war years in Germany and broadcast from there to
Ireland...
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By Colm Tóibín
Excerpt:
In 1969, two years after my father died, my
mother, my sisters and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new
history of the 1798 Rising, The Year of Liberty by Thomas
Pakenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate
we could see Vinegar Hill where 'our side', the rebels, had made
their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I
hesitate to say 'facts') about the Rising: how the English had
muskets whereas we just had pikes, how the English poured boiling
tar on the scalps of the Irish and then, when the tar had dried,
peeled it off. The names of the towns and villages around us were
in all the songs about 1798 -- the places where battles had been
fought, or atrocities committed. But there was one place that I
did not know had a connection with 1798 until I was in my
twenties. It was Scullabogue. Even now, as I write the name, it
has a strange resonance. In 1798 it was where 'our side' took a
large number of Protestant men, women and children, put them in a
barn and burned them to death...
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Names Index:
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G H
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