Colm Toibin's last novel, The Master (2005), was extraordinary. Literary critics may have blenched at Toibin's imaginative recreation of Henry James's life ("what chutzpah", wrote Hermione Lee in the Guardian) and taken issue with certain depictions of the Master, but they admired the writing; it was an "extensive, misty and intricate work", according to John Updike in the New Yorker.

Readers expecting something similar from his new book, a collection of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons, may be surprised, though not disappointed. Its tone is unremittingly austere and it seems to spring directly from Toibin's work before The Master, in particular The Blackwater Lightship, published in 1999.

Eight of the nine stories have been published elsewhere, which leads to the uncharitable suspicion that this is a collection brought out to capitalise on The Master's success and its 2006 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The title, which for many might evoke love and a warm glow, is not to be trusted. These are stories about betrayal, bitterness, endurance and rupture. English critic Terry Eagleton has noted that "in Ireland, mothers are more than mothers because they are symbols of the suffering nation", an observation that Toibin plays with, particularly in the first story, “The Use of Reason”.
Its unnamed protagonist is a hardened criminal, whose latest coup is the theft of several Old Master paintings. He has no means of safely disposing of them until a heroin dealer called Mousey Furlong puts him in touch with two Dutchmen. There follows a very funny scene in which "he tried to look controlling and menacing and wondered if the Dutch had a different way of doing this. Maybe, he thought, wearing glasses and being skinny and drinking coffee meant tough in Holland."

I had to read the story twice, however, to appreciate the humour, which is swamped by the overall impression of a psychotic personality at loose in a corrupt and fearful Dublin.
"He's a bit like a fox," says his drunken mother, who lives on his handouts and relies on his reputation to keep her neighbours and local pub in line. Everything is subverted in this searing story, reason included.
“The Name of the Game” is equally disheartening, despite its premise of a middle-aged widow with three children overcoming the enormous debt left by her incompetent shopkeeper husband. Toibin mercilessly recreates the claustrophobic atmosphere of the small town in County Wexford in which Nancy transforms her grocery corner store into a hugely profitable fish-and-chippy, incurring many small humiliations from the locals.

What she has not foreseen is the change in her son from normal pest to a tireless worker in the chippy, secure in his future as a young man of standing in the town, and with no desire for the university education she so keenly wants to buy him.
Toibin himself grew up in a small town in Co Wexford and here, much as in The Blackwater Lightship, he draws on its worst aspects.

Other stories are leavened with Toibin's evident enthusiasm for Irish music. In the slender “A Song”, a woman estranged from her son for many years sings a lament in a crowded pub, knowing he is there, watching her. The substance of her voice is beautifully rendered. “Famous Blue Raincoat” describes a son's pride in his mother's former career as a singer, and the painful memories he causes her by his retrieval of the old albums from the cellar.
A beachside techno rave provides a sense of release for the bereaved Fergus in “Three Friends”, as does the cocaine-fuelled sex he enjoys with his mate Mick in the sea, a descriptive passage that borders on lush for Toibin.
Nothing redeems the mordant tone of the last and longest story, the only one not set in Ireland but in Catalonia, a place dear to Toibin's heart. “A Long Winter” concerns a family in the Pyrenees, in a hamlet even more isolated and conservative than backwater Ireland.

Miquel, just returned from the obligatory two years of national service, realises that his mother has become an alcoholic. Goaded by his brutish father, she walks out one day and is caught in the first winter snowstorm. The house deteriorates under Miquel's inexpert care until his father finds an efficient domestic called Manolo, an orphan with whom Miquel becomes close. Repressed homosexuality, dysfunctional families and social enmities loom large in this tale, which shows the influence of Elizabeth Bishop, whose work Toibin admires.

Terry Eagleton wrote of The Blackwater Lightship that "there are times when one wishes this tight-lipped author would break out of his extreme verbal evenness for some more costly imaginative gesture". I wish I'd written this lovely sentence which could equally apply to the prose in Mothers and Sons. The upside is that Toibin makes each word count in every story. This is a collection of absorbing, almost unbearable intensity from the Master of restraint.

First published in the TLS.