Reading Ireland 2024: Nora Webster by Colm Toibin

 'So this was what being alone was like, she thought. It was not the solitude she had been going through, nor the moments when she felt his death like a shock to her system, as though she had been in a car accident, it was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted. all of it oddly pointless and confusing.'

Nora Webster is a widow. Her husband Maurice has died after a cardiac illness, leaving Nora to bring up their two young sons, Donal and Conor. Their two older daughters, Fiona and Aine, are away at school and university. Colm Toibin perfectly captures Nora's numb grief as she attempts to navigate a new life, one in which everything seems futile, but with which she must come to some kind of terms for the sake of her children - and for herself.

Nora is fundamentally a quiet woman, Maurice had been the outgoing one. Now, exposed to the world with no buffer, she stoically bears the endless visits from neighbours, family and friends - for this is 1960s small town Ireland, everyone knows everyone else's business, and while wanting to offer Nora their sympathy, some callers also want to get the gossip, or in one case even to tell Nora that their son will be pleased to buy the family's holiday cottage from her,

'"I think though he'd like to have something here, a place he could visit...He thought you'd be selling Cush"......She spoke as if it were nothing , but now, as she looked at Nora, her gaze was hard and concentrated and her chin began to tremble. "He asked me if you'd be selling it," she said, and closed her mouth firmly.'

But inside Nora, there is pain and fear and rage, and as she struggles through the months without her lover, her husband, the father of her children, Nora gradually learns how to overcome fear and turn rage to good use. 

Colm Toibin writes the detail of this story so perfectly (he comes from Enniscorthy himself, and Nora Webster is partly based on his own childhood.) Tiny incidents are captured so well, and have so much more importance than seems at first. The nuance and cadence of the speech patterns of County Wexford resound on every page, but Toibin's luminous prose gives us much more than that. Nora moves through her days as if in a daze, a dream; she feels remote, frozen into her grief. Toibin's style is intentionally flat; for a long while Nora just does this, does that - he is showing her going through the motions of everyday life, switching on the radio, making the tea, locking the door - because that is what life feels like to her; it has lost all of its light.

Toibin has said that, on reading Hemingway at the age of 17, he was fascinated by,

'the idea of character in fiction as something oddly mysterious, worthy of sympathy and admiration, but also elusive. And more than anything, the sheer pleasure of the sentences and their rhythms, and the amount of emotion living in what was not said, what was between the words and the sentences.' (The Guardian, 17 June 2011)

Nora also struggles with her children. She tries to keep her feelings in check to avoid upsetting them, to suggest outings and holidays to cheer them up, but she knows they are as miserable, in their own ways, as she is.

Donal, the elder of the two boys, is especially sensitive. He has a stammer, is uncommunicative and finds it hard to make friends. Instead he retreats into the world of photography. In this he is aided by Nora's Aunt Margaret and Uncle Jim. Margaret is keen to offer Donal dark room facilities in her house, and to pay for his equipment. Nora realises that Donal is confiding in Margaret, that he finds her gentle, sympathetic manner easier than Nora's more brittle one. She is slightly piqued but accepts the situation because she knows Margaret is trying to help, and that Donal is being helped, and that's what matters.

Similarly with the girls, she accepts that they now have lives of their own, that they talk more to her sisters than to her, and that those sisters know more about Aine and Fiona's lives than she does. Nevertheless, there is no showdown, no hysteria here, partly, perhaps, because Nora is too locked into her own misery to mind too much, but mainly because she is a sensible woman. 

Nora does not have the luxury of money. Every financial decision is carefully weighed and budgeted. The house at Cush is indeed sold, and Nora has to return to work in the factory she thought she'd never have to set foot in again after her marriage.

But gradually we see Nora start to rediscover her own character, one that had become so (willingly) melded with Maurice's that she had buried interests and ideas that didn't fit. She starts to listen to music, eventually buying her own record player, and takes singing lessons - this brings her joy, and takes her out of the sad drudgery of everyday life. (She and Maurice had never listened to music or gone to concerts together because he saw other music lovers as pretentious.)

'What she had not told anyone, because it was too strange, was how much this music had come to stand for, it was her dream-life, a life she might have had if she had been born elsewhere. She allowed herself to live for a time each day in pure fantasy...'

She decides to decorate, choosing everything herself,

'The idea of what she would do with the rooms downstairs kept her awake. She had to remind herself that she was free now, that there was no Maurice who would be cautious about costs, and grumpy about anything that would cause disruption to his routine. She was free. She could make any decisions she liked about the house. She felt almost guilty as it occurred to her now that she could do whatever pleased her. It could all be done, anything she wanted, as long as she could afford it. If Jim and Margaret disapproved, or her sisters or daughters came with advice, she could ignore all of them.'

At work she stands up to the bullying office manager, telling the Gibney brothers, owners of the company, that she simply will not put up with this treatment. She talks to the drivers who want to join a union; the Gibney family is furious, but she stands her ground. And most strikingly of all, when her son is unfairly moved to a lower class (ostensibly to spread the cleverer children out among the others) she is incandescent with rage, confronts the priest in charge, and tells him she will picket the gates of the school unless he moves Conor back. She's even bought the pens to write her slogan and the placards to write it on'

'.."and perhaps if you are talking to any of your colleagues tonight you might mention to them that I will curse any teacher who passes my picket. I think you might have heard of the power of a widow's curse."'

There is still harrowing grief, it does not go away just because Nora is busy, but step by step she learns to live with it, and to see the possibility of a future without Maurice. High on painkillers for muscles she has strained while painting the ceilings, she hallucinates and sees Maurice in their bedroom. In reply to her urgent questions he tells her that everyone will be alright - except Conor, about whom he gives no answer. Desperate as that message makes her, the apparition proves to be cathartic. At last she can let her sisters turn out Maurice's clothes. At the bottom of the wardrobe they find a box. What Nora does when that box is prised open shows us that she has, however painfully, begun to move on. 

Nora Webster is a story of grief, of loss, and of the capacity of the human heart for love, and for recovery. Colm Toibin's powers of observation and understanding are exceptional; his writing more than matches those skills. This book is a quiet masterpiece.

Nora Webster by Colm Toibin is published by Penguin. I first heard it read on BBC Sounds by Siobhan McSweeney; the programme is not available just now, but if it reappears I highly recommend a listen, McSweeney's voice is absolutely perfect for this book.