Interrogation as a Way of Life – Max Frisch’s Bluebeard

Like a suicide, a crime well investigated makes even a lazy reader pay attention, looking for clues that might explain what happened. In the Swiss writer Max Frisch’s tale Bluebeard (Blaubart), our attention is rewarded with a short but rich exploration of the consequences of one man’s experience of being under investigation for murder. Though he finds himself “acquitted for lack of proof”, the accusation of murdering his ex-wife leaves Dr Felix Schaad stuck in a kind of self-interrogative mode of thinking long after he walks free. In this way, Frisch’s tale becomes both a kind of parable about identity under threat, a challenge to all investigative legal systems, and finally a story about the relationship between truth and conviction in a world of unreliable and confused memories and witnessing.

The Crime

Dr Felix Schaad, a doctor and respected member of Zurich’s upper-middle class, is informed that his ex-wife Rosalinde was found strangled with a menstrual pad stuffed in her mouth and a tie used to finish her off. Rosalinde, now an escort, had seemingly remained on good terms with Schaad and the two had met on the morning of the crime at her house – he had been seen by two witnesses. Most importantly the tie, we learn immediately, is his. Schaad has no alibi because his excuses – walking, or being in his office – cannot be corroborated. For the courts, the question is simple – why did he do it? For the reader, inhabiting something approximating Schaad’s mind, there’s a different question – did he do it?

Interrogation as a way of life

The first thing we notice with Bluebeard is the narration. This is a short, dense book, but also a divided one. On the one hand we have Schaad, brief flashes from his own mind as he tries to play billiards or go for a walk, and on the other we have the world of his intrusive thoughts, coming in the form of memories of his time at court. This dialogue is delivered using dashes rather than quotation marks, which gives it a formal quality, as if we are reading a transcript or report. Neither section lasts more than a page or at most two before we shift into the other. At one point Schaad plays billiards. The clicking of the balls can keep his attention focused, but when he stops to use some billiard chalk on the cue, these memories burst in. Their very shortness on the page makes them feel sudden and, as it were, diegetic.

More important than the division of the text into interrogation and narration is the relative weighting of the two. Schaad is utterly dominated by the remembered, then later imagined, world of the court. “Acquittal from lack of evidence – how can anyone live with this? I am fifty-four.” This is the entirety of his introduction to us. Then we return to the dialogue. As a portrait of a man, we get very little of who Schaad is through these sections. Rather, we get a sense of how he lives – entirely in the shadow of the remembered trial. He cannot take his own life or leave Zurich, for either of these would be considered a tacit acknowledgement of his own guilt for the murder. Even as the months pass, and Schaad sells his medical practice, the trial remains in his own mind. He has left the interrogation, but it hasn’t left him.

At some point we notice that we are moving on from memories into something stranger. Schaad’s dead parents are questioned as witnesses, even Rosalinde herself is brought forth. Though he is now free, the fantastical prosecutor continues to challenge Schaad’s every action. In a way, this makes me think a little of that famous philosophical injunction to know oneself. In Schaad’s case the self-questioning becomes so dominant that it totally destroys his ability to live. He wants to be free of it, but nothing seems to help – alcohol, walking, travel. At the end of the book he is finally so broken by the questioning that he actually does the one thing that he imagines means it should stop – he goes to a police station and admits the guilt that feels is his own but, as it turns out, never was.

In Bluebeard interrogation becomes a way of life, just as the court drama changes Schaad’s life. His friends are called in to bear witness against him, his name covers newspaper headlines, and he loses his livelihood as people no longer want to be treated by him. On a simple level we can read this as a fair complaint about how being accused of murder works. Yet on another, it’s about identity and how hard it can be to maintain. All of Schaad’s secrets are placed in public view and this leaves him unable to allow himself any privacy again in case he should once more be subjected to judicial scrutiny. No independent life remains for him. He becomes fearful, trapped within the biting thoughts of his own mind. 

Truth, Guilt, and Certainty

If the effect upon someone’s identity of being dragged through the courts is one key thematic aspect of Bluebeard, another is its treatment of the matter of truth. We might want to say that the judicial system aims at truth, but really this is a desperately idealistic suggestion. Much fairer is to say that it aims at a relative certainty – a “good enough” reading of the facts that can convince the court of one thing or another. Nothing higher, no matter the evidence marshalled, is in the end determined. If truth was something so simple to establish, the philosophers would be out of a job.

Just as a narrator wants to present his or her version of events, not the truth, so too does the prosecution in a legal environment. But this is a bias, an interpretative lens, that barges in and pushes truth out of the way, whenever it is inconvenient. Schaad, for at least some of the people in the court room, has murdered his ex-wife, and all that remains is to find the smoking gun. As Bluebeard comes from a time before omnipresent CCTV or DNA testing, instead the goal of the investigation is to find a psychological justification for Schaad’s actions. If the goal were interpreting physical evidence like fibres or fingerprints, perhaps Schaad’s mind might have emerged relatively unscathed. Instead, the evidence is mental, personal, psychological.

Schaad’s many ex-wives are interviewed to find proof that not only was the man subject to fits of jealousy, he also took out this rage on others. (They deny it, stating that his violence was only ever directed towards himself). Schaad’s drunken comments to a friend that he could strangle Rosalinde appear as clear evidence of his intention. But if he did not kill her nor did ever truly intend to they mean nothing except that he should watch his language better. The same can go for the notes that Schaad made or his diaries, which are likewise trawled through. Eventually, even his dreams are interpreted. (At this point we have moved beyond memory of the trial into imagined persecution, I hope). None of these pieces of evidence confirms that Schaad did it, but they aim at building enough certainty that they might ultimately displace any question of the truth.

Yet all these pieces of evidence are inherently unreliable. Just as the court tries to find its truth, or rather certainty, we see how flaky it is – which is why Schaad ultimately gets acquitted. Schaad himself cannot remember what his tie is doing in Rosalinde’s home, or account for his every movement. A witness who claimed to have seen him that morning later admits that it was actually his wife who saw him, because he himself was in the cellar. Another witness is just a child. “As witness you have to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. You know that false witness is punishable by time in prison, and in serious cases by as many as five years there.” This phrase is repeated over and over as witnesses are introduced. But it’s hard not to read it ironically, when there’s so little truth reported, and so little accurate witnessing.  

Conclusions

The power, though, of institutions like courts is that they can determine, at least to a certain extent, what is true. They get inside the head, as they do to Schaad. They turn chance remarks into dark intentions, and leave him unable to live his life. I found myself thinking as I read of another person faced with the overwhelming power of truth-determining institutions, Nellie Bly. The American journalist visited the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on today’s Roosevelt Island after posing as insane, but dropped the act once she was already in there. Yet “the more sanely I talked and acted, the crazier I was thought to be”. Just as with Schaad, all action and speech becomes refracted through the idea that a person is guilty – of murder or in this case mere madness. To protest that one is innocent, as Schaad does, is proof that one is guilty. An innocent person, of course, has nothing to hide.

Bluebeard is short but intense. In a way, it feels like Kafka’s The Trial, in that both works are both real and both parables of justice. Both works end with their central characters admitting to a guilt that is not really there, though Frisch’s tale, being situated in something closer to the real world, is kinder, and leaves Schaad alive. To me the interest in the work lies not in the crime itself, but in the light the work throws upon those human fallibilities of memory and motive, and especially in that very real-feeling form of madness as Schaad turns his own interrogation into a way of life.

Bluebeard was the last work of fiction that Frisch published in his lifetime. Reading it, you can see how it might have felt like an end for him. What it says about the possibilities of narrative and truth-finding are just too negative, the impacts upon a life from this fact are just too stark. Still, it makes for a work worth pondering.

The War Poetry of Viktoria Amelina, and her language

Viktoria Amelina was a Ukrainian writer and war crimes investigator who died following a Russian missile attack upon the city of Kramatorsk in June 2023. More than once, I have read of Ukrainians referring to her as the person who could have written their great novel of national survival and resistance. (Her first novel was about the Maidan Revolution in 2014.) Even without such talk of future greatness, her life was cut off while she was very young – only thirty-seven. She ought to have had so much time, for whatever becoming was to be. Twelve other individuals died from that same attack, including four children. Who knows what futures they might have found or made for themselves also, if only the missiles had missed.

I found the small collection of Amelina’s poetry, Svidchennya / Testimonies, in a strange little bookstore in Amsterdam that specialises in Eastern European literature. Amelina only wrote a few poems before her death, and the collection is padded out with art and a lengthy chronology of her travels and prizes and a thoughtful afterward by the writer Sofia Chelyak. Really, I cannot complain about the size, for the daintiness of the book made it something I could carry around with me at work, snatching a few lines here and there. It also meant it was not intimidating, like a novel, for someone approaching it in the original Ukrainian.

“I don’t write poetry
I am a prose writer
It’s just that the reality of war
eats up punctuation
the coherence of a subject
the coherence
eats up
as if into our language
there fell a shell”

Amelina’s poems range from such broken, fragmented verse, to more structured poems where the line lengths are fuller, the punctuation orderly, and there is even a hint of a rhyme. All of them are responses to the invasion of her country. We can imagine something like the verse I quoted above being scribbled in a notebook as she sits in a jeep under fire, heading towards a frontline city to try to protect her people. Then there are the more reflective verses, where I picture her sitting in some sad anonymous hotel room (in New York, say, waiting for a prize or the chance to speak), thinking of all the people who are not there anymore, or who have lost so much:

“When Mira left her home, she took with her a bead from her curtains
When Tim left his city, he took a small stone from the street
When Yarka lost her garden, she took an apricot’s stone
When Vira left her home she took nothing
“I’ll be back soon,” she said,
And took not a thing at all”

The poem names these people, and goes on to list still more of these little things, these talismans and protectors against a sense of greater loss, that people take with them.

“And then your home will be in your pocket,
And there it will sleep

You should take your home from your pocket
In a safe place
When you are ready”

These lines are beautiful because they are humble. Often, narratives of war and trauma are about overcoming. Here, Amelina states clearly that it’s not for the poet to decide how the narrative looks – it’s for the person to decide for themselves. “When you are ready.” Take your time to mourn, to grieve, and only then start again.

The poem ends still more strikingly, for someone like me (or, I presume, you), reading this far distant from the direct horror of the war. The second-to-last verse runs like this: “And what would you take with you?” Literally, this is Amelina asking herself (the word “take” is in the feminine singular past), and she answers her question (these stories). But it’s just as much, by hanging there in a separate line, a question to ourselves as readers. Reading something like Amelina’s poetry requires us to put in these imaginative leaps. It’s a kind of moral obligation. Reading it and remaining detached would be like pressing your face against the barbed wire fence at the edge of a camp, viewing what’s inside as a spectacle instead an outrage to your fellow-feeling.

The importance of naming and individualisation is also highlighted in the poem “The Losses of the Ukrainian Army”. It begins by noting that these numbers are secret, but then goes on, as if straining against the injunction to keep silent, to start numbering them:

“There will be the neighbour, a rather eccentric one,
Who planted red flowers.
The friend who never told off anyone.
The translator, whom we loved so much.
That girl who annoyed everyone.
The artist whom everyone liked,
But, it seems, loved that girl.”

A comparison with this kind of writing which comes to my mind is the work of Anna Akhmatova, in her Requiem, written with her son imprisoned during the Great Terror but not published until long after: “and I pray not for myself alone, / but for all of them, who stood out there with me.” Such a concern for others is no different to Amelina’s involvement of ordinary people by telling their stories in her own poems. Likewise, when Akhmatova says “I would like to call everyone by name, / But the list is taken, and there’s nowhere else to help me find out” she shows the same concern for naming and victims as individuals.

Yet while Akhmatova’s poetry is inevitably far more accomplished as poetry, thanks to her huge experience and focused talent in that medium, Amelina’s poems, at least to me, are just as powerful – indeed, possibly even more so. The majority of the poems in Testimonies are short, but as we read them we have an awful sense that they are alive. The number of people who have had to leave their homes since Amelina’s passing has only increased with new incursions into Sumi and Kharkiv regions. The defence of southern Donetsk has collapsed, leaving only the north unoccupied. This year civilian casualties have increased significantly as the air attack has ramped up in scale. And of course, whenever Amelina lists those who have died, we have to add the line with her own name ourselves. It is impossible not to.

These days, too, the mood is worse than when Amelina was writing. Her poems come from a time when hope of a complete victory was higher. She has a poem from April 2022 that seems almost overly optimistic to me now: “The future – it’s what we ask ourselves about during a quiet moment: / Do you see it? / Can you see it?” Of course, the answer eventually is a kind of yes, a kind of affirmation. The Russians had already left Kyiv region in a “gesture of goodwill”, and by the end of the year they would have been driven back to the Dnepr in Kherson Oblast and lost most of the lands they occupied in Kharkiv Oblast. Yet with the exception of the Kursk incursion, which did not restore control over any Ukrainian land, subsequent Ukrainian offensives have been failures. Russia still has the upper hand on the front, the current US administration is not particularly friendly to Ukraine and fatigue is rising, both domestically and internationally.

The future, yes, I see it. But I do not look forward to it.

The poems are full of striking images, striking less because they are unexpected than because their truth is impossible to deny. Amelina was there from the beginning, volunteering, documenting what her own eyes witnessed and others passed on with words. There’s so much grief and loss, and so many childless women wandering homeless – it’s a mood like that conjured by Beckett at times, but retaining a more direct connection to real events in a way that heightens (for me) their impact. What I like about them is that they prove Adorno’s comment that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz” except that which deals with it. A new barbarity has created a new (for Amelina) way of expression, and driven her from finely-tuned prose into this direct and damaged poetry.

Perhaps the main German-language poet of the Holocaust was Paul Celan, a writer whose highly-allusive, pared down, language makes him a real challenge for me to read and understand. (Incidentally, his birthplace is in today’s Ukraine.) Both he and Amelina reacted to the horrors they faced in a similar way – the destruction of punctuation, the shattering of extended lines. But one thing that differentiates them is this sense of hope: Amelina’s poetry occasionally retains narrative and therefore a sense that the chaos of life at war can still be brought into order somehow in a way that Celan’s, in my experience of him, does not.

All this is to say that these poems are not just recollections of war, but poetry in and of themselves, poetry that stands comparison with other writers, just as much as it brings sad pleasure on its own.

I read Amelina in the original Ukrainian, which is my first time reading an extended work in that language. I have no formal learning in it, aside from reading a few chapters of a “Colloquial Ukrainian” textbook to note the key grammar endings where they differ from Russian; all I do is speak that other language fluently. I had no particular intention of learning Ukrainian either. When the full-scale invasion began I subscribed to various Ukrainian news channels on Telegram so I could keep up with their perspective, and after a few months a number of them gradually switched language from Russian to Ukrainian. I was annoyed (as were many of their readers), but kept reading. Somehow, gradually, I stopped merely reading and began understanding too. The written languages are very similar in practice, so it was not hard. A comparison would be reading Dutch if you speak German and English. Even without knowing Dutch, you can understand much of what is written. As if by magic. Listening, however, is another story.

As a result of this, however, there’s something uncomfortable about my Ukrainian. A little bit like how the war effected Amelina’s poetry, it’s shaped my understanding of her country’s language. To give an example, I knew the word for “rape” in Ukrainian when I saw it here, but had to google the word for “flower”. I probably know, at this point, more ways of saying “to die” in Ukrainian, than I do in German, the language of the country where I actually live. I’ve come to recognise that Ukrainian is a beautiful language, but all the words I know in it are words of violence and horror.

But there’s another source of discomfort, too: the sheer ease of the language is disturbing. Coming from the “language of the occupier”, it’s like I’m not even learning Ukrainian as itself, but myself colonising it. Every time I come across a “new” word and it’s immediately guessable because it’s a word I know in Russian with a different prefix or using an “і” instead of an “и”, I feel like I’m cheating. Though I do try to view it the other way – that every Ukrainian word that I have to look up is the language proudly asserting its difference – it doesn’t quite wash away the distaste entirely, perhaps because the number of shared words seems so high.

Taras Schevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet (though he also wrote a large number of prose works in Russian, and a few poems), while imprisoned in what is today Kazakhstan, had a similar kind of problem. He found that his Ukrainian was beginning to collapse from being so long away from a Ukrainian-language community. He was making mistakes, for example by using Russian prefixes on his verbs instead of Ukrainian ones. All languages stand in continuity with every other, but Ukrainian and Russian are so close that the former is in practice forced to constantly be on watch for the words of the latter seeping in where they are not supposed to be. While reading Testimonies I sometimes found myself searching for words which in the end I could only find in Russian dictionaries.

All this is to say that, reading Amelina as a Russian speaker, you also have the shock of a language asserting itself:

“And this is also not poetry
Just the truth
Written in a column
Without punctuation
In Ukrainian
(That’s important)
To gather money for the AFU
And for my sister”

I am glad I read these poems, that I heard Amelina’s voice and was able to translate a few snippets of it here. (Out of copyright considerations I did not do more, but I’ve written to the rightsholder to ask if I can do the rest of the poems mentioned and will make a separate post if they agree). Many Ukrainian cultural figures like to tell us to stop reading Russians and start reading Ukrainians, but the fact remains that Ukrainian has few translators, even for authors as canonical in their tradition as Schevchenko, Ivan Franko, or Lesya Ukrainka. While I have my misgivings with a considerable amount of what these contemporary cultural figures say on this and other topics, the idea that we should all hear about Ukraine from its own people is something that there can be no reasonable argument against.

That is why I’m grateful to have the opportunity to share Amelina’s voice with the readers of this blog, as a small contribution to that end.

The original poems and others can be read on these pages:

“Жінко, він ще до тебе повернеться, твій Азов”: добірка поезій Вікторії Амеліної

“Наче у мову влучив снаряд”: добірка віршів Вікторії Амеліної про війну

Here you can read three of her poems, professionally translated:

Three poems | London Ukrainian Review


	


	





	

		
		
Widowhood and Its Narratives – Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster
	


	
	
	

		

Widowhood is a word with its own well-known narratives. The shock of grief sets us up for a story of overcoming that grief. The loss of, in traditional societies and marriages, the guidance and expertise of the husband – who may, for example, have been entirely responsible for his wife’s finances – prepares us for a tale of growth into now-vacant spaces. Should the husband have been bad or later become recognised as such, we can have a story less about overcoming grief and more about becoming the person that the late partner never allowed one to be. Perhaps there might even be a new man – or woman – as confirmation of one’s new life instead of a grief-stricken stasis.





I mention these narratives not to say how the Irish writer Colm Tóibín subverts or ignores them in his novel of 2014 Nora Webster, for he largely does not. After the early death of her husband Maurice in late-sixties Ireland, Nora is visited daily by townsfolk who want to tell her how sorry they are. She grieves, and by the end of the book has largely overcome that grief. She grows a little, and not just into financial responsibility. Maurice does not turn out to be a bastard, but the life that Nora ends up leading does differ from the one they had and might have come to have had in several ways. Tóibín’s prose is every bit as considered and thoughtful as the gentle movements of his story. Conventional, predictable, a critic might say.





I am not sure, setting out on this post, how far I am one of those. Asking a book to be other than it is, is normally just a reflection of one’s own prejudices. What is true is that Nora Webster lives and dies by its details, which is unsurprising given Tóibín’s love of Henry James. It is the more nuanced growth that a reader can chart from such details that really makes the book much more interesting compared to the headline story of a woman getting over the death of her husband. How does she grow, whether this growth is entirely positive or not, and so on.





Maurice Webster took his time dying. During that time his wife nursed him, leaving their four children – Fiona and Aine, Donal and Conor – with relatives or studying elsewhere. For the prioritisation of her husband there’s the faintest suggestion of a reproach from the aunt who had taken in the two boys – “they stayed here. And it was silent. And they thought you might come and you never did.” Nora did not return calls, nor did she visit, and at the start of the book she gives herself another cause for guilt – she rashly sells the family’s holiday home to the first enquirer, even though it held wonderful memories for her children. Soon one more guilt is added – the reminder of a cruelty to a colleague some twenty-five years ago. Nora is not perfect by any means.





Besides guilt, another emotion Nora contends with is shame. One of her children has a stammer (and indeed, it stems from her abandonment during the period she nursed her husband) that she never gets round to organising a speech therapist for. Then there’s the matter of money, or rather her lack of it, which only partly explains why she sells the holiday house and does not organise the speech therapist. She has to accept an offer of employment with a local business she once worked for when still a teenager, for example, and discovers that many people she knows have done better for themselves than she has. “Nora had never heard her sister say the word “fabulously” before.” Her other sister also gets engaged without ever introducing her fiancé to Nora. Other challenges include the memory of a difficult mother, who never encouraged her to develop her musical talents.





Over the course of the book Nora does manage to address some of these emotions, but in many cases her success is limited. Her relationship to her children remains poor and distant throughout. It is his aunt who builds a darkroom for budding photographer Donal, not his mother, to whom he barely even shows his pictures. While relatives encourage (and fund) Donal to study at boarding school or Aine to go for a university in Dublin, Nora does the opposite, trying to cling on to these people without any result except furthering their mutual misunderstandings. It’s a curious marker of the novel’s structure that at the novel’s end she’s left alone with her youngest son, so that even though she has reached a kind of triumph in moving on from Maurice’s death, she has ended up in a situation is approaching desolate.





Still, in any case she has gained independence. Through music, through clothes, through haircuts and hair dyes, Nora finds a new way of representing herself. If early on in the novel her independence consisted of consciously choosing not to help with the dishes while being a guest at her sister’s home, thus going against how she had been taught to behave, later on she shows her personality through buying a record player, learning to sing, and buying some dresses. From a kind of negative freedom – a refusal – she moves to a private, affirmative one, even if it is one that is dependent upon her material conditions improving. (One of the ways time is marked in Nora Webster is the occasional comment that a recent budget has improved the allowance granted by the state to widows like herself.)





Finally, Nora even eventually turns that independence into an assertiveness. When one of her sons is moved down in class, unfairly in her view, she writes to each of the teachers declaring she will picket the school until the change is reversed. It certainly is independence, but whether it is maturity is another matter. This harms her daughter’s prospects of getting a teaching job and reveals a real thoughtless selfishness about her. When one of the teachers asks her to consider the other parents and children she simply says “I have no interest in the other parents”. She also never truly tries to understand why her son was moved down to begin with.





Maturity is important because one of the threads I most enjoyed in Nora Webster was the treatment of politics in the novel and its relationship to Nora’s changing perspective. Within the novel Nora grows up politically. Her husband was a significant figure within local politics with the Fianna Fáil party, but Nora herself lived in his shadow – I had the impression she hardly would have allowed herself to utter a thought contradicting his, even though the novel makes clear that on church matters she was more progressive than he, for example.





Politics, for a woman at home in a happy enough marriage, can sometimes arrive dulled. For a widow forced to take up work, it’s harder to avoid. Nora’s interest in her widow’s pension makes her aware of the finance minister responsible for her. Her work brings her into contact with the Haves, in the form of the Gibney family, and the Have-Nots, in the form of their workers. By working in the office of the Gibney daughter, Elizabeth, and through an acquaintance with her mother (who married into the family from a background closer to Nora’s), Nora’s position seems to be one aligned with an unassuming, unaware privilege.





Instead, however, Nora comes to shift towards the workers instead. Politics in Nora Webster is “elsewhere” but still available for those with eyes to see. In plain language: it’s on the telly. Just as in Marilynne Robinson’s Home, where the Civil Rights period comes to small town Iowa through a new television, in Nora Webster the early stages of The Troubles come to her through her own. But who notices besides her? At work it is only a lorry driver who responds to the violence of the British in Northern Ireland in an appropriate manner – “The baton charge on Saturday was serious. They were marching for civil rights. They were on their own streets. I am telling you now that is a disgrace”. Nobody else even seems to notice it.





Ultimately, Nora even joins the workers of the Gibneys’ business as they have a meeting to unionise. For Nora, this is an important milestone in her growing independence – “it was the idea that she had made a decision for herself, the idea that she had asked no one’s advice.” But what is interesting is that the narrative reflects a growing unease on Nora’s part. She’s shocked by how negatively the workers speak about the owners, and how positively about a colleague that Nora had not got on well with. Though Nora does end up joining the union, this long central chapter does not end there, but shows the reaction of the Gibneys when they find their employees have suddenly decided to unionise. While Elizabeth reports humorously that one of the brothers is busy complaining about the “Bolsheviks”, the narrative focus briefly lingers upon the head of the family, who “doesn’t want to see the place ever again. He has known some of the staff for forty years and some of them have been with the company even longer. They all stabbed him in the back.”





Industrial action is plenty more complicated than Tóibín can depict it here, but what’s important is Nora’s perspective. She sees the blindness of both the workers and of the owners, which gives her a kind of privileged position of maturity from which she could defuse any tension. I think this sense of clarity could have been explored much more in the book, for it is an area where Tóibín could really have emphasised Nora’s growth without simply falling back into these traditional narratives of overcoming grief or choosing an independent life outside of the memory of one’s husband. Sadly, this local politics is not pursued much further, and as for the country-level topics, Nora’s last word – where she declares that she would get a gun in her house if any of her children were shot at a march – rather suggests that the moral maturity I’ve spoken of is ultimately an illusion.





I think this is the most significant problem with the novel. Nora Webster is the story of a normal woman, quiet, self-effacing, in a time of relative unfreedom. Her opportunities are limited and perhaps we are supposed to praise her for whatever she does choose to do. But this crushing normality – her failures with her family, her mistakes – means that there is little in particular to like or be interested in about her. The opportunities for narratives that are more complex than just overcoming grief – through religion, through organised labour and a new perspective – are hinted at but ultimately never explored. Nora’s difficulties with her family are never resolved. She grows, in the sense of making friends and doing things, but not in the sense of moral growth or resolving deeper problems. We should be happy for her, but that doesn’t mean we should be happy to be with her.





In a certain sense, this novel is too long for what is ultimately just that standard narrative I named at the blog post’s start. It has that Chekhovian atmosphere of quiet failure about it, emphasised by that final image of Nora alone with her youngest son, in an emptied nest that is as much her own responsibility as that of her husband’s cancer. Too long in such a world is painful, rather than edifying. There were some very good moments – the final chapter is haunting (literally) and superb – but all this is not enough to unflatten for me what is ultimately a rather smooth book. I’m pained to write this since the whole reason I read Nora Webster was because, during a period of poor utilization at work, I watched quite a lot of Tóibín’s interviews and thought he was a lovely and very interesting fellow. I’m sure he is.





Temperamentally, however, I just didn’t like his book. Alas.