I don’t normally read short stories. I don’t want to invest in characters who are only going to be with me for a handful of pages. But I was happy to make an exception for The News from Dublin due to the powerful impact each story had on me.
Tóibín has a gift for the opening. Every story in this collection plunges you straight into someone’s life and it’s impossible to look away. The tone throughout is everyday and matter-of-fact, which stops the stories being a grim read despite some of the heavy blows the characters are dealing with. It’s how life is.
What stays with me is the moral complexity. In ‘A Free Man’, we follow Joe as he leaves prison to a clamour of waiting media and the silence of a family who want nothing to do with him. He flees to Barcelona that same day, and I was empathising with his isolation long before I understood what he’d done. But even when I knew, the author makes it impossible for me to dispatch this person as completely unworthy.
The settings are often essential to the plot. In ‘Five Bridges’ a man only just getting to know his daughter must leave America for good because he’s an illegal immigrant, knowing he can never return to visit her.
Separation across distance runs through the whole collection, whether it’s Joe fleeing Ireland or Montse displaced from Spain to Argentina in ‘The Catalan Girls’ where her failure to be as adaptable as others means she lives in the shadow of an overbearing sister. She at last has a chance to breathe easier and be truly herself when she returns home.
Not everything landed for me. The title story felt grimmer than the rest and was based in an Irish context I didn’t know enough about to fully understand, and “Sleep” fell a little flat for me. But these are minor quibbles in a story collection that punches above its weight.
In these stories people continue in spite of their troubles. They meet what happens to them and don’t fall apart. So even if you usually steer clear of short stories, it’s worth investing in these ones.
