Book Review - The Empty Family

The ties that bond

Colm TóibÍn's collection of deeply moving stories explores the meaning of family, writes Gavin Corbett

The Empty Family by Colm Tóibin

Colm Tóibin

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Colm Tóibín is on familiar ground in his new collection of stories. They take place in Enniscorthy and on the Wexford coast, in Catalonia and in Baggotonia. Familiar characters also populate the book. Henry James has a cameo, and there's a brief mention of the tragic Rose Lacey from his last novel, Brooklyn, but in the main the characters here are recognisable from Tóibín's previous works not for who they are, specifically, but for the type of people that they are: gay men and strong-minded, independent women. What distinguishes them on these pages are the choices they make. They reject societal and cultural expectations and spurn familial and nuptial bonds to create new bonds, to be true to themselves, and to make their own versions of 'family'.

In the devastating first story, 'One Minus One', a son reciprocates, in his mother's dying hours, the coldness shown to him by her in his childhood. "She had never wanted me much," he recalls, this someone "whose heartbeat had once been mine". By her bedside he is told that "her heart was not beating strongly enough to send blood to every part of her body". A dysfunctional mother-son relationship is also at the centre of 'The Colour of Shadows'. The point in both stories is clear – blood ties are sometimes not enough. But then other relationships are seldom wholly satisfactory either; a dull marriage forms the backdrop of 'Silence', and in 'The Pearl Fishers', a gay man considers the hypocrisies and "easy rituals" of marriage after meeting an ex-lover who has chosen to bury his past identity by getting married and having children.

Family comes under attack again in 'The New Spain'; here, an exiled communist returns to her homeland in the late 1970s to find her parents engaged in the great capitalist project authorised by the outgoing fascists and its new king, and ponders how to reverse the process. In 'The Street' – one of two other Spain-set stories in the book – a Pakistani man, living in a teeming rookery in the Catalan capital, finally discovers the true meaning of 'family'.

The collection's title, appropriately, refers not to family in the conventional sense but to the more abstract idea of the hopeless clutter of the universe. In the titular story, the protagonist, an academic who has retired to the weather-beaten coast, takes relief in the chaos around him and in the revelation that our grip on understanding is so slim. The man on the beach sounds very like Colm Tóibín; he offers no easy answers to the larger or more local questions, just elucidates awkward truths and suggests that peace may come if only we yield to nature and give ourselves up to imperfection.

By turns polite and blunt, but always deeply moving, the stories here – like the surf-washed pebbles on that Wexford beach – will be read for meaning and enjoyed for their shape and sound for ages to come.

The empty family
By Colm Toibín
viking, £17.99, 214pps