[In the following review, Scurr praises Tóibín's control of the narrative in The Blackwater Lightship.]

Five years before the publication of his first novel, The South (1990), Colm Tóibín interviewed the writer John McGahern for the magazine In Dublin. Passion tempered by precision, the hallmark of Tóibín's journalism and later his fiction, was manifest on this occasion in a remarkable report of a conversation about books.

He [McGahern] agrees that there is no tradition of the novel in Ireland, and no fixed settled society from which the novelist can feed; no sharp world of manners and morals. He agrees that maybe this is where the peculiar desolation in his work comes from, that this is what saddens his work.

When he could get a word in, McGahern agreed, but the extreme, almost breathless analysis was Tóibín's own. It is no surprise then to find him, four novels later, obsessively reworking themes of fracture and absence in the culture of Ireland.

The Blackwater Lightship is set in the same place as Tóibín's second novel, The Heather Blazing (1992): the cliffs near Cush, a village east of Enniscorthy and Wexford. The muck and marl slipping into the eroding sea, split-open houses and ruined outbuildings falling on to the strand; by now, these are the familiar emblems of Tóibín's unsettled Ireland. It is a society where manners and morals are all mussed, where there are rifts of silence and resentment between the generations; families are divided by history or religion, and only united in a generalized hardness of heart. Tóibín's earlier novels struggled determinedly with two unwieldy themes: the passage of time and politics. Both are resolved here through a sober combination of writerly experience and compromise.

In The South, Tóibín presented the tension between past and present by means of the long, bizarre life of Katherine Procter; a life spanning the Troubles in Ireland, and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Katherine's edgy claim to be free from the “weight of history” was set against a careful understanding of the ambiguities of exile, but all this, on top of periods of intense civil strife in Ireland and Spain, made for a chaotic, rather brittle narrative. The Heather Blazing was calmer, because Tóibín separated his protagonist's past and present, rigidly switching from one to the other to bring a studied, explanatory light to bear on the mid-life crisis of an eminent Irish judge. The Blackwater Lightship is much more poised. Neither brittle, nor rigid, the narrative is largely composed of conversation between six people brought together by an ordinary and universal catalyst: illness. Declan is a young gay man dying of AIDS. Now extremely sick after years of successfully concealing his condition from his family, he asks to spend a short period of remission in his grandmother's house in Cush, accompanied by his mother, sister and the two gay friends who have nursed him through earlier phases of the disease. This simple scenario, classically consistent in time and place, allows free rein to Tóibín's impressive emotional understanding. As though struck by lightning, the house on the cliff is suddenly alive with the cross-currents of personal imaginings, resonances, pains, dreams and prejudices. Declan and his sister, Helen, still resent their mother's behaviour at the time of their father's death from cancer years before. Helen has never allowed her mother, Lilly, to meet her son-in-law and grandchildren. Lilly's relationship with her mother, Helen's grandmother, is also complex, centring on unseemly disagreements about who owes whom, what and why.

The presence of three gay men in the house, each with a unique and hard-won understanding of the peculiar predicaments of homosexuals in Ireland, is a brilliant foil for the corroded remains of the traditional family unit. Here at last is a narrative completely under Tóibín's control, and so much so that even the humorous conversational exchanges serve to intensify and not to dissipate the tension which is his theme. “‘I think I prefer your granny to your mother,’ he said. ‘I did that for a while too,’ Helen said. ‘It's a mistake.’” Politics has always had a place in Tóibín's fiction. His novels don't centre on politics. (They aren't like Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, for example.) But the earlier novels refer to it prominently, and this can be a problem. One particularly sly review of Tóibín's third novel, The Story of the Night (1996), suggested that his concern with state repression and torture in Argentina in the time of the generals might simply reflect “some of the airier anxieties of the gay condition.” In The Blackwater Lightship, Tóibín has retreated. Granny's cats, which sit on top of the china-filled dresser, one each end, are named after Garret FitzGerald and Charlie Haughey. And that is as far as the overt political references go. Instead of the far-reaching analogies between Ireland and Spain, or homosexuality and political dissidence, The Blackwater Lightship settles for a patient anatomy of the complex emotions inside an unhappy family.

This novel perhaps stands in the same relation to Tóibín's next as one of Goya's beautiful court portraits does to his painting “The Shootings of May Third.” What better foundation for understanding the politics of Southern Ireland could there be than this patient reconstruction of the fractures and silences within a single family? The Blackwater Lightship holds out the possibility of reconciliation. It has affinities with Tóibín's journalistic account of a pilgrimage to Lough Derg, when, almost against his agnostic will, he found himself caught up with spiritual forces: “there seemed to be a kindness building up between us.” Like the pilgrims, Declan's family and friends find themselves improbably drawn together around the kitchen table at dusk: “It's like going to confession, except there's no lighthouse in a confession box.”