By Colm Toibin, 2014

I bought this book at Audrey’s just before Colm Toibin was in Edmonton for the Festival of Ideas in November 2014 and read it only recently. The novel begins quietly and builds to a crescendo.

It is the moving story of a middle-aged widow living through the grief and shock of her husband’s death in the late 60s and early 70s in small-town Ireland while trying to carry on with her life. She is haunted not just by the absence of her husband Maurice but by her memories of his terrible painful death from cancer in a small country hospital where everyone could hear his groans and cries. The doctor refused to prescribe adequate painkillers because Maurice’s heart was not strong enough to withstand them.

Nora has four children—two daughters who are away from home and pretty much grown and two prepubescent sons, one of whom has developed a stutter in the months she has spent away from him while staying with her dying husband. Nora was so preoccupied with her own grief and Maurice’s suffering that she did not visit her sons (who stayed with their great-aunt Josie) in these months.

I have not been widowed but I have lived through grief and loss. I also grew up not in but close to a small town. I find the way the novel handles both these themes extremely moving. The book begins with Nora’s response to yet another caller who has never before been in her house—a place Nora sees, now more than ever, as her private sanctuary—to express sympathy. It feels to Nora like the world is trying to take over her life in a way that does not suit her. As many do in such a situation, Nora has a difficult time striking just the right tone, not wanting to come across as too needy or too grateful while struggling to be gracious enough. She senses she has lost status and that people who were previously respectful because of her husband now feel free to patronize her.

Nora has enjoyed being a homemaker and having the house to herself while Maurice and the children are at school, and has given as much of this time as possible to reading. She is proud of not being continually busy around the house like her sister Catherine. Nora keeps her own counsel and there are hints throughout that her sisters and her aunt find her difficult. These hints become overt when Nora overhears the other women talking when they think she is sleeping in Catherine’s house, where she has gone for refuge.

Money is a continuing concern. Maurice’s brother and sister help out financially with the children. While appreciating their help, Nora resents not being apprised of what their aunt and uncle are doing for and with the boys. After a few months of mourning Nora returns to work at the office she left when she married Maurice and comes under the tyrannical thumb of a childhood enemy named Francie who has run the place for years. Francie never becomes more than a caricature and the scenes involving her are the weakest part of the story. After a popular politician grants widows bigger pensions, Nora is able to reduce her hours of work and keep this horrible woman more at a distance.

Maurice was a respected teacher who taught everybody’s children, and there is the sense that of the pair he was the one more at ease in the world, the one who helped Nora mediate her relationships outside the home. I saw a similar pattern with my first parents-in-law. My father-in-law was an extremely sociable and popular teacher, and years after he retired I still met strangers at parties who told me he was their best teacher ever. His wife, like Nora, was a more reserved person who managed their home with efficient aplomb but was often uneasy in the outside world. At his funeral I sensed she needed him there to greet the mourners. Over the years since his death she has become more outgoing and something of a social butterfly in her eighties.

Throughout the novel Nora moves in this direction. She is saved by the passage of time, by the people around her who do their best to care for her, and by her renewed involvement with music. She begins singing lessons with a teacher who becomes a friend, after being referred by a woman she barely knows who has asked her to help keep score during a contest. From the singing lessons she branches out into involvement with the Gramophone Society, something Toibin talked about his mother participating in when he was being interviewed by Elizabeth Withey in 2014. This may have been a peculiarly Irish thing, at least I had never heard of it before. It involved a group getting together to listen to recordings of classical music chosen by the members in rotation. Nora finds solace in the music and in the undemanding social setting. She also realizes she is free to return to these earlier interests now because Maurice never really cared about music.

The Roman Catholic Church remains strong, although there are cracks in its armour. Sister Thomas, a nun who has kept an eye on Nora and Maurice throughout his illness, is more of a curse than a blessing to the grieving woman. (“In another time, you would have been burned as a witch,” Nora thinks to herself at one point.)
The children find their own way in the world. Nora’s elder daughter becomes engaged; the second daughter gets involved in the troubles in Derry. The stuttering son goes off to a private school (with the financial and moral help of his aunt and uncle) where he has a difficult time, but at least he is not sitting in the same room where his father taught every day. The delicacy with which Toibin describes Nora’s efforts at maintaining a relationship with this son while giving him space to grow is beautiful.

Eventually Nora encounters the presence of Maurice in their bedroom when she feels she is alone in the house, although her sisters Catherine and Una tell her it was all a dream. More than three years after his death, the sisters help her clear out Maurice’s clothes. Life goes on, but with a somewhat different texture and shape.
The language in which Toibin describes Nora’s grief and her getting on with life is restrained and lovely. In the novel he gives Nora the space to grieve that people are seldom allowed in real life.