Mothers and Sons
Book: Mothers and Sons
Author: Colm Tóibín
Review: * * *
Tóibín followed ‘The Master’, his most successful novel, with this set of short stories. A few of the stories evoke vintage Tóibín: rich characterisations with brilliant control, but these sit alongside his worst writing yet. The lengthier pieces are the best as Tóibín has not adapted his style, which requires time and a series of emotional crescendos, to the shorter form with any great panache.
The average author makes it easy to guess their origins and sexuality; never has Tóibín written anything so blatantly, monotonously ‘Irish’ and ‘Gay’. Alcoholism, the gulf between Irish and English ways of life and Catholic sex abuse are all present, but this is not overtly objectionable. What is, however, is ‘The Journey’, a coarsely written tale of drugs and fraternal love in the absence of the mother. Tóibín falls into the oldest literary trap, and inevitably the result is bad sex.
Mercifully, the longer stories are expectedly marvellous. ‘The Name of the Game’ removes financial power and educational predestination from the male, and describes the resulting desolation. Tóibín searches for greater psychological truth than the Oedipus cliché, and finds instead that the empowerment of one gender creates the enslavement of the other.
