Colm Tóibin at his ease in Catalonia. Photo: Catalan News. Ship in Full Sail: The Laureate Lectures and Other Writings, by Colm Tóibín (Gallery Books, €16.95)
Colm Tóibín may not appreciate this recommendation, but his latest collection would be a perfect Christmas present.
These thirty-six articles of varying length are the collected writings from his three-year term (January 2022 – 2025) as Laureate for Irish Fiction. There are the texts of three Laureate Lectures, with more than thirty writings from his monthly blog on the Laureate website. The digital origin of the writings does not disguise the real nature of the work, because these are essays and thus revive a literary form that lost its prominence in the mid-20th Century.
Colm Tóibín has written very insightfully and sensitively about modern Catholicism and about the contemporary Papacy, but his focus in this collection is on literature. The breadth of his reading is extraordinary: fiction in several languages, music, and memoirs.
When compiling a collection such as this, writers often gather previously published articles, even newspaper columns, and book reviews. Ship in Full Sail is resolutely and entirely original. We have not read any of this before, so each essay is refreshing rather than recycled, and there are no hints of familiarity. It is all so new that we never know what to expect as we turn to the next essay.
Narrative
Tóibín describes the way in which characters can take control of the narrative from the novelist who invents them. Backgrounds are fundamental, so we revisit Enniscorthy, meander through Joyce’s Dublin and throw up our hands in justifiable horror at the appalling neglect of Number 15 Usher’s Island, the house where Joyce set The Dead, one of the most famous stories in the English language. That story has been translated into many languages, with special illustrated editions having been published in both Spanish and Catalan in 2022.
Tóibín, who lived in Barcelona when Catalan was still marginalised by the Francoist authorities, has become an important link between Irish and Catalan culture, succeeding the late Pearse Hutchinson, who for many decades was Catalan’s only advocate in Ireland. Barcelona is evoked in all her splendour and contradictions in several essays.
Broderick’s originality and the variety of human relationships featured in his novels prove that he justified the cliché of ‘being far ahead of his time’”
The author has had the advantage of becoming friends with many contemporary writers, both Irish and otherwise. There are thought-provoking reflections on Eugene McCabe, on Thom Gunn, on the life of John Montague and on the letters of Seamus Heaney. One of the longer essays discusses and evokes the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who may now be in danger of being quoted rather than read.
The saddest essay is “The Case of John Broderick,” which laments the limited fame of the gifted, Athlone-born novelist (1927-1984), whose career was blighted by censorship here in Ireland, and whose books deserve far more attention than they have ever received. Broderick’s originality and the variety of human relationships featured in his novels prove that he justified the cliché of “being far ahead of his time.”
There is a historical element to some of the essays, with consideration of Tóibín’s own family in the 1911 Census. There are reflections on our War of Independence and Civil War, seen from the requests for pensions and from the recollections of the participants.
Really good writing and originality mark this collection. The book itself is well designed. At its cost, it’s an inexpensive seasonal gift.