This time in a month I will be on the west coast of Ireland.To get in the mood I thought I would read some Irish novels. Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship was the first I picked off my shelves. Much of it is set in Enniscorthy not far from where I'll be staying and the rest is acted out in Dublin, where I land in early June (following in HRH footsteps?).
Toibin's prose is typically understated, his sentence construction simple, reflecting the tight-lipped characters. He layers character and action deceptively slowly. Not much seems to happen but backstory and shifts in mood and attitude register chapter by chapter until we realise that a turnaround in the relationship between mother and daughter has been achieved.
This gradual unfolding worked for me in The Blackwater Lightship but I tired of the slow pace of Toibin's latest novel Brooklyn well before its anticlimactic ending. His writing is not for sustained reading on a long journey. It works best as bed time reading - a bite at a time, mimicking the tiny portions of story and character he allows us in each chapter.
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