Sam Leith explores the effect that certain writers’ relatives have had on their published works
This book’s sort-of preface is a lecture on aunts and absent mothers in Jane Austen — an odd diversion, given that nowhere else in its pages are aunts, or female writers for that matter, given much of an outing. Colm Tóibín sets out his stall early doors: he’s a formalist. Noting the difficulty critics have had getting to grips with Mansfield Park’s great couch-potato Lady Bertram — is she a goodie or a baddie? — he rebukes them high-mindedly:
The novel is not a moral fable or a tale from the Bible, or an exploration of the individual’s role in society; it is not our job to like or dislike characters from fiction, or make judgments on their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern, a set of strategies, closer to something in mathematics or quantum physics than something in ethics or sociology.
Well, yes. True, of course, but it is a harsh counsel of perfection both for readers and writers. Tóibín, like many of us, rows back from it a bit in the way he actually goes about things. Most of the readings in the essays that follow are biographical, psychological and personal at least as much — in fact, in most cases far more — than they are technical or formal. Tóibín, with great subtlety and sometimes with splendid impudence, is interested here in what you might call the higher gossip.
Given that this is a miscellany of essays and long book reviews published elsewhere, it’s pleasantly surprising how well New Ways to Kill Your Mother hangs together, how unforced it feels thematically.
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