Recently-bereaved Nora Webster must make her way through 1960s-era Enniscorthy, rearing her two sons and two daughters, while struggling to make do with her widow’s pension and the financial assistance of family members.
There are hard decisions to be made, like the sale of the holiday home, dear to Nora’s memory as a treasured family retreat. Now that her husband Maurice is gone, it will never be the same again.
Meanwhile, she deals as best she can with the demonstrations of sympathy from friends and neighbours who have been calling for weeks. The gaping absence of Maurice is keenly felt, along with memories of his painful illness, and the effects of bereavement on her children.
There is a wonderfully-evoked scene in a bar in the Co Wexford coastal village of Blackwater - site of the aforementioned holiday home - replete with unruffled Wexford goodwill. The men insist on buying the women Babycham and brandy and ginger. Someone sings Elvis Presley’s His Latest Flame and Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa. Despite the festive air, Nora feels the absence of her late husband, her sense of desolation adeptly conveyed with one of those miniature, narrative flourishes at which the author excels.
After long years spent as a housewife and mother, in widowhood, Nora must reluctantly return to work at a local business. She begins to interact again socially, learns to appreciate classical music and begins to sing herself, with help from a local music teacher.
As the story progresses, Nora begins to get some perspective on her loss, affording one of those sudden, luminous observations with which Tóibín can lift tone with sometimes astonishing effect. In the scene in question, she is in her singing class with her teacher Laurie. The austere majesty of the writing bears echoes of James Joyce’s short story, The Dead.
“When the playing stopped and the song had ended, Laurie did not move. Nora stayed still too. In the silence of the room, it came to her how they would all take their turn in the world, shadows within shadows, as mother had done and her mother had done, as all who came before her had done, as she had just now moved from breath to breath, from one sound to another . . . .”
Nora Webster is a masterful, often moving story which seems to offer more heft than Tóibín's most recent `Irish’ novel, Brooklyn. The newer work has more of the sense of a bildungsroman, dramatised, as it is, almost entirely in one extended family, and set almost entirely in County Wexford.
Paddy Kehoe
