To be a mother or a son in Colm Toibin’s first collection of stories is to define yourself firmly in other terms. Most of the characters he writes about would rather not be related to anyone at all. While the relationship between a mother and a son is Toibin’s touchstone, these stories are broader and deeper than this suggests. In ‘The Name of the Game’, a widow struggling to pay off her husband’s debts has to contend with her son’s precocious entrepreneurship; in ‘Three Friends’, a young man follows his mother’s funeral with an all-night rave and a seminal erotic encounter. The associations between these events are never made explicit, but left tangled and obscure.
Death is a frequent visitor in these lives and makes itself felt most powerfully in the novella which concludes the collection, ‘A Long Winter’, in which a mother abandons her family and vanishes in the Pyrenees. No-one writes about loss like Toibin. His greatest strength is his restraint: this is a voice so unobtrusive that sometimes it feels as if there is no writing going on at all.
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