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Review [published January 2005]
Colm Tóibín: The Story Of The Night
Peter Robertson
Short-listed once again for the Booker Prize, this year
for The Master, about the life of closet-gay novelist
Henry James, Tóibín has become even more of a name
in Britain. But his hopes were dashed a second time –
in October that country’s most coveted literary prize
was awarded to rival gay writer, Alan Hollinghurst, for
his novel, The Line Of Beauty.
While Hollinghurst specializes in evocations of the
effete English aristocracy, Tóibín’s trademark is gloom.
This tendency is showcased in his novel, The Story Of
The Night, inspired by his experiences in Argentina. As
a journalist, Tóibín visited Buenos Aires to cover the
trials of the Generals who had ‘disappeared’ thousands
of civilians in the early 1980s; but on humid summer
nights, crazed with desire, he cruised a cityscape
charged with sexual expectation.
Tóibín was exposed mercilessly to the self-denial
of ‘machismo’ – the gay men he met, married or with
girlfriends, boasted that no one would ever know their
real orientation. This is not the case with the novel’s
protagonist, Richard Garay, who comes out to his
mother – she expresses “utter contempt”. The narrative
BUY Colm Tóibín books online from and
of The Story Of The Night spans the genocide waged by
the military junta, the gung-ho nationalism of the Falklands
war and Argentina’s phoenix-like regeneration
after wholesale privatization. In spare and fluid prose,
Tóibín explores Garay’s cultural duality (Argentine but
of English descent) and charts his meteoric rise from
jaded English teacher to full-fledged yuppie. Befriended
by undercover CIA agents, Susan and David Ford, and
bedecked in Italian designer suits, he even gets the man
he desires – the handsome son of a wealthy senator –
who leaves home to live with him in a dream penthouse
down by the river. Garay has everything he has ever
wanted, so why not leave it there?
True, he later goes haywire during a trip to New
York where he snorts cocaine and ends up as the sexual
plaything of a seedy public relations executive. Tóibín
could have glossed over such aberrations but is determined
that these should be milestones on the road to a
pitiless nemesis. Even worse, by the end of the novel,
the novel’s four most important gay characters (Garay
and his boyfriend included) have been poleaxed by
AIDS. In an image that will delight many homophobes,
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