Colm Tóibín talks about his Enniscorthy childhood, the inspiration behind Brooklyn – and why Boris Johnson is right about the Irish border
The last thing Colm Tóibín does every night in New York before turning in is read the Irish Times: “There’s really nothing I don’t know about what’s going on in Ireland,” he says. The 62-year-old is in his overstuffed office at Columbia University, and although he has been coming to the city for years, he has only recently started writing about it: “What the sunset looks like on the Hudson. In the winter, you get this really extraordinary red, and if there’s ice on the river, it looks like the American sublime.” But every night, in his head, he returns home to Ireland.
Home is one of Tóibín’s great themes. It’s an interest most explicitly explored in Brooklyn, his breakout novel of 2009, and to which he returns in House of Names, a retelling of The Oresteia by Aeschylus. As told by Tóibín, after witnessing his sister’s murder, the young Orestes is banished both literally and in the sense of becoming estranged from himself; “a sad boy”, says Tóibín, “who doesn’t know who he is or what he is”, and who reminded the author simultaneously of Hamlet and himself.
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