Colm Tóibín: Nora Webster (2014)

Nora Webster, recently bereaved, is visiting her sister Catherine's house. 

They went to bed early. Nora was glad to be away from them and from the talk of auctions and big houses and new washing machines. It was clear to her that there was nothing she could have spoken to Catherine and Dilly about, nothing that would have interested her or them. When she asked herself what she was interested in, she had to conclude that she was interested in nothing at all. What mattered to her now could be shared with no one. Jim and Margaret had been with her when Maurice died, and that meant that all three of them could talk easily when Jim and Margaret came to the house because, while they did not refer to those days in the hospital, what they went through then underlay every word they said. It was there with them in the same way as the air was in the room, it was so present that no one ever commented on it. For them now conversation was a way of managing things. But for Catherine and Dilly and Mark conversation was normal. She wondered if she would ever again be able to have a normal conversation and what topics she might be able to discuss with ease and interest. 

At the moment the only topic she could discuss was herself. And everyone, she felt, had heard enough about her. They believed it was time that she stop brooding and think of other things. But there were no other things. There was only what had happened. It was as though she lived under water and had given up on the struggle to swim towards air. It would be too much. Being released into the world of others seemed impossible; it was something she did not even want. How could she explain this to anyone who sought to know how she was or asked if she was getting over what happened?

She woke early in the morning, dreading the day ahead. She wondered if the boys felt like this too. Dis Fiona and Aine also dread the day ahead when they woke? Jim and Margaret? Perhaps, she thought, they had found other things to preoccupy them. She, too, could find other things to think about -- money, for example, or her children, or the job in Gibney's. Finding things to think about was not the problem for her; the problem for her was that she was on her own now and that she had no idea how to live. She would have to learn, but it was a mistake to try to do so in someone else's house. It was a mistake to lie here in a strange bed when her own bed at home was strange too. The strangeness of home, however, did not require a bright response from her. It would be a long time, she thought, before she would leave her own house for a night again. 

(Nora Webster, Ch 4)

Nora Webster is so many things. It uses chiaroscuro to striking effect. First impressions may be that the reader is assaulted with a multiplicity of names. And it's true; the novel draws near, quite deliberately, to the ordinary café talk that we sometimes overhear and find incomprehensible, and also to the genre of popular family sagas. 

"She knew the story of her life down to her maiden name", Nora reflects about May Lacey, a fellow townswoman who has never been to her house before (p. 3). But to give us a thrilling sense of sharing the immense network of knowledge in any ordinary existence, the author must not plod, but paradoxically must be highly selective: throw intense light here and here, leave the rest in suggestive shadow... The exercise of working out Nora's family tree (see below) shows that the novel is actually distinctly selective in the names it chucks at us. We never learn Nora's maiden name. We never learn the names of her mother or father. We never learn the names of her sister Catherine's children, or even how many there are. Nora hasn't much interest in these nephews and nieces, we infer; nor in her cousin John (whose wife is simply called "John's wife"). But as for her mother and father it's the opposite inference: they mean so much to her that her thoughts would never distance them by using a name. 

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The novel is written strictly from Nora's point of view, which brings us to other chasms. She often becomes aware that her sons share some secret, or that her daughters have been saying something about her, but these mysteries are not to be solved, just briefly wondered about, like the way you wonder about the reason for something in nature, but know you'll never trouble to find out. 

The sea [at Curracloe] was rougher than she ever remembered it. She wondered if there was more shelter at Cush  and if the waves there broke more gently. Also, the strand there was shorter and there were stones at the edge of the shore. Here there were sand dunes and the long strand, no stones, no shelter, no cliffs made of marl ... (p. 179)

The wondering fades away with the events of the day. For instance when the boys are playing about on the lifts in Arnott's. They are away so long that she starts to worry.

When they found her, they pretended it was nothing, that the lift had merely stopped at every floor. When she told them that she had thought they were lost, they gave each other a look as though something had happened to them in the lift that they did not want her to know about. (p. 20)

The bereaved Nora remembers her time with Maurice as idyllic and no doubt this was basically true but not all there was to it. Perhaps being married to Nora wasn't always plain sailing. Perhaps Maurice who was so warm and social ( her buffer against being exposed to society or needing to have opinions) was also often opinionated and ignorant (e.g. about musical life, p. 204). Maurice strongly disapproved of Nora's anonymous letters to Sister Agnes (p. 233). There must have been the usual marital arguments. 

Other people, including some of her own family, treat her with a certain caution: as if Nora was felt to be rather a difficult prickly person. She was a demon before she met Maurice, says Catherine (p. 301). 

There were also times her own family repeatedly mocked her (p. 205); perhaps they were not always angels even in the hallowed past. On the whole, we guess, they had been a reasonably normal family.

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Nora never got the chance of a university education. Her imagination and interests are local. She reads novels mainly to switch off, she watches the news on TV, she intermittently reads newspapers. The novel delights in capturing the ordinariness of her thoughts. It makes us take these ordinary thoughts seriously. Her life, we see, is culturally rich though it isn't full of  the arts (high or low) or studious abstract thinking. A film (like Gaslight) or music (the Archduke trio) can suddenly  a provoke a deep response, but she doesn't live for these moments.

Nora could not think why Nancy was telling her all of this as though it were urgent and fascinating news. (p. 157)

When Aine's Leaving Cert results came, they could not have been better and this meant that Aine would be going to University College Dublin. (p. 188)

Those mundane thoughts make us warm to her because we recognize them as ours. Nora's thoughts are audible in the prose, often signalled by their mundanity. Nora is a kind of narrator, as everyone else is, in her internal thoughts. She is driven to put a shape on her experience, and sometimes we can hear her preparing the expressions she would use to narrate it, should anyone ask. She is a pretty honest narrator to herself, not markedly self-deceiving, but she's still unreliable because there's so much about her own life and about Enniscorthy life that she will never know. 

*

Some things Nora doesn't know: 

why it was that she didn't contact her boys for such a long time when Maurice was dying. 

the other side of the bullying office manager Francie Kavanagh, attested to by Sister Thomas and the young bookkeeper. 

what happened when Laurie O'Keefe's picture changed (p. 204).

who is "the other one" mentioned by Maurice (p. 294). 

*

Dates. The action of Nora Webster occupies about five years, from October 1967 to Summer 1972. (No year dates are mentioned, but they can be worked out from public events.)

One of the incidental joys of the novel is its realization of provincial Ireland during this specific historical era. The first two years occupy about seven chapters each. The next three years occupy just four chapters. 

Ch 1  October 1967.

Ch 2 January 1968

Ch 3-5 Six months after Maurice's death. If he died in August 1967 that would make it February 1968. 

Ch 6 Working at Gibney's. Spring 1968

Ch 7 Summer 1968. Then, p. 113: The riot and baton charge in Derry. It is 5th October, 1968. 

Ch 8 October 1968

Ch 9 Late October 1968 to Christmas 1968 (p. 138-40).

Ch 10 March 1969 (p. 144). 

Ch 11 subsequent weeks...

Ch 12 The quiz night. May 1969?

Ch 13 Summer holiday: July 1969. (The landing on the moon took place late on Sunday July 20 GMT, the moonwalk in the early hours of Monday July 21st GMT). Later Aine and Donal follow the riots in Derry and Belfast (mid August 1969). Fiona visits London for a few days at the end of the summer.

Ch 14. Music lessons. From September 1969 and the next few months?

Ch 15. May 1970 (Haughey's arrest for gunrunning). The holiday in Sitges, in the first two weeks of September 1970, followed by Conor being put in the B class. Goes through to February 1971 (Aine on TV).

Ch 16. Goes through to early summer (1971), late July (p. 250), September (p. 252) when Donal starts at St Peter's. 

Ch 17. Christmas 1971. January 1972. Bloody Sunday (30th January 1972) (p. 263). British Embassy attacked 2 February 1972 (p. 265) -- the episode where Aine goes missing. Late February (p. 274): Nora gets interested in doing up the house. Painting the ceiling (April 1972?).

Ch 18. No dates are mentioned but it follows on. Summer 1972, basically. 

*

Nora's family:

Maurice, a teacher, has recently died. Aunt Josie looked after the boys while Nora nursed Maurice in his last months. Aine was at home with Una looking after her (and Fiona visiting them regularly). 

Josie was a teacher until she retired. 

Nora's father died when she was 14, Nora was alone with him. Nora was her father's favourite, Josie says (p.34).

Nora's mother had once been a servant girl at a farm (p. 62), later worked in Cullen's (p.63). She was a good singer.  She had a small shop (p. 50). Nora's mother died when Nora already had children; it was seven years before Maurice died (p. 196) i.e. about 1960. Nora didn't love her mother when she was alive, there was coldness between them (p. 196) and Josie thinks her mother didn't know what to do with her (p. 34). 

Both Nora's grandmothers died before she was born (p. 284)

Neither Jim nor Margaret have ever married, they live together in the old family home. Jim is 15 years older than Maurice. 

Maurice and Jim learnt Irish in the Kerry Gaeltacht forty years ago (p. 105).

Maurice had another "delicate" brother, who died (p. 167) of TB (p. 301). 

Maurice had a cousin called Aidan (p. 169)

Maurice's grandfather was evicted from his farm for political activity. Aine's politics came from her Webster side, according to Aunt Josie (p. 299).

Aunt Mary is mentioned on p. 284.

In the course of the novel, Una becomes engaged to Seamus.

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Nora Webster runs parallel to major events in Colm Tóibín's youth. His own father Mícheál died in 1967 (like Maurice). The novel is in memory of his mother Bríd (d. 2000) and his younger brother Niall (who died in 2004, aged just 44); they are (and aren't) the characters Nora and Conor; Colm himself is (and isn't) Donal. 

About his mother, and much more: this great interview with Kathy Sheridan in the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/colm-toibin-i-start-and-i-finish-1.1943080

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Nora's car is an old AustinA40 at the start, an old Morris Minor in the recent past. Perhaps an error? (The car on the jacket image is neither, as far as I can make out.)

*

"Too young to die, they say. Too young? No, rather he is blessed in being so young thus to be made swiftly an immortal. He has escaped the tremulous hands of age." (p. 47)

The quotation that Nora wants on the memorial card (given more fully on p. 51) is by the English Dominican Bede Jarrett (The House of Gold: Lenten Sermons (1931)).

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On Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2025/01/reading-around-colm-toibin-master-2004.html

On Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing (1992):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2017/06/colm-toibin-heather-blazing-1992.html