Tóibín

Essays A writer’s roots A Guest at the Feast Colm Tóibín A Guest at the Feast Colm Tóibín A writer’s roots In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem…

Publishers are very naughty. Even as many of them seem increasingly to disdain journalism, they’re often perfectly happy to repackage the stray bits and pieces of their luckiest writers as “essays” before sticking them opportunistically between hard covers. In the case of the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, I’ll give Viking a semi-pass for doing precisely this. He is a beloved and celebrated novelist. But I should also say that subscribers to the London Review of Books may feel a bit miffed should they cough up for A Guest at…

In one of the essays in A Guest at the Feast, Colm Tóibín declares: “God represents a real problem for the novelist. The novel is happier in a secular space.” He is writing about Marilynne Robinson, a writer skilled, as he says, at “making religious thought easy” – easy for the reader, however unbelieving, to accept. It is a skill he admires. Yet his own novels hardly inhabit a “secular space”. Catholicism is a live presence in all the ones set in Ireland, while his interest in Christian myth even led him, in The…

When I went to live in Barcelona at the age of 20 in 1975, I thought I would get to see loads of opera. The first ticket I bought was for Puccini’s La Bohème at the Liceu, starring Montserrat Caballé as Mimi. When I found my seat, however, I discovered that I had no view at all of the stage. Standing up would not help, because there was not even enough headroom to stand.I grew sad when the music began, in the sure knowledge that the stage must be bathed in beautiful light and the costumes must be gorgeous and the set…