When Colm Tóibín arrived at the door of the studio to be interviewed for this week’s podcast, he told me that he had just been delayed on the way by a woman who wanted to tell him what a great man he was, spreading joy across the country and how much she loved hearing him on the radio. As so often with Colm Tóibín, it’s impossible to tell if he is joking.

But the encounter did happen it transpired – in some form – and it reveals something of Toibin’s stature. His latest book, A Guest at the Feast is a collection of his essays and a reminder of his brilliance as a journalist as well as a writer. 

It ranges from reflections on his childhood to a piece “A Brush With the Law” which recalls his conversations with Supreme Court judges while he was editor of Magill to his magnificent ‘Among The Flutterers’ essay for the LRB on the church in Ireland and across the world.

The Currency’s editor Ian Kehoe, also from Enniscorthy, was in the studio when Toibin arrived and the conversation between the two men about their shared experiences and people they had in common was an insight into Toibin.

It seemed like the right place to start the conversation because of his extraordinary recall.

“I could go home and see someone’s grandson or granddaughter on the street and you could know from the face who it was. And even when the film of Brooklyn was on in Enniscorthy, there was one family who came in, the grandson was so unmistakably a member of that family that anywhere in the world, you’d have to say to him, you have to be the son of so and so, the grandson of so and so.

“It’s a very strange idea that. It’s also really strange when you go to the graveyard in Enniscorthy because you suddenly realise, ‘I didn’t know that’. I can see an entire generation, like my parents’ generation, all of them are dead now, You can see their dates and where the graves are. There’s a whole rolling world in a town of that size. I don’t deliberately think about it, it just comes into my mind all the time.”

Colm Tóibín. Photo: Bryan Meade

These memories roll into other memories, going to Croke Park to watch his brother playing hurling with the Wexford minors (Ian Kehoe’s father was also on that team) and a visit from the great Nickey Rackard to his school where Rackard told the class about his progression into alcoholism.

As always with Toibin, the conversation wandered, from the church to Ireland on to Brexit, to Qatar and the World Cup which he compared to being in Italy in 1990. 

He made the gesture of gagging his mouth when asked about Sinn Féin.

“I will really watch what I say now, because I have strong opinions. And I’m not sure that these opinions would not cause me a lot of grief if I said them. Section 31 goes two ways, you know, there’s a really good way to silence someone, which is to start slapping libel actions constantly around the place, if people say certain things. So now watch the gag around my mouth. They were against Section 31, well, I feel that there’s a Section 31 about what I would now like to say to you, that I’m not going to say to you.”

Colm Tóibín and Dion Fanning. Photo: Bryan Meade

But it was those early recollections that left a mark. As he writes in “A Guest at the Feast’, 

“All of us have a landscape of the soul, places whose contours and resonances are etched into us and haunt us. If we ever became ghosts, these are the places to which we would return.”