![]() ![]() He has deliberately written neither the default gay novel (polemical and operatic) nor the required Irish one (superstition, bigotry, whimsy.) ![]() Toibin's main business in the novel seems to be the denial of expectation. Two gay friends of Declan's are also in attendance. They are forced together in a crumbling old house (Chekhov, again) in Wexford in order to nurse Helen's brother, Declan, brought to his final days by Aids. In The Blackwater Lightship (shortlisted for the Booker Prize this week), three generations of women from the same family - Helen, a young married woman, her mother Lily and granny Dora - have come to a bruised truce after decades of dissent. In Ireland at the century's end - as in Russia at the century's beginning - tight rural communities try to ignore the shifts in the cities, and the past is haunted by the future. ![]()
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