His Socks, His Silences

Adam Mars-Jones

  • The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín
    Picador, 312 pp, £15.99, September 1996, ISBN 0 330 34017 4

Colm Tóibín’s frustrating new novel starts from a pleasingly skewed perspective: its narrator Richard Garay (less often, Ricardo) was brought up in Buenos Aires, child of an Argentinian businessman and an English woman who never adjusted to her new surroundings and clung in imagination to a country she had left in the early Twenties. She spoke to Richard always in English, and the combination of his flawless accent and fair colouring ensured that he grew up thinking of himself as English. It also enabled him to get work at a language school despite the mediocrity of his talent as a teacher. When Argentina invaded the Malvinas (the year after his mother died, thankfully, so that he was spared the inevitable chauvinism of her reaction) every-one expected him to be pro-British or at least divided in his loyalties. Instead he found himself part of a general mood of excitement and belonging, which afterwards people preferred to forget.

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Vol. 18 No. 19 · 3 October 1996 » Adam Mars-Jones » His Socks, His Silences (print version)
Page 15 | 2218 words