Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees. A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone volume and then as the final story in the 2006 collection Mothers and Sons, followed Miquel through dramatically extreme circumstances and patient endurance. It was told with the most restrained prose ever likely to be employed for a son’s view of vultures circling a corpse.
Now, in The Bridge, a single year has passed in Miquel’s life and he is eking out an existence with his hurtful, unyielding father. The sheep are grazing their high summer pastures; a side hustle smuggling contraband brings in a little much-needed cash. In the bare conditions of the lonely farm, any warmth of feeling is a kind of contraband smuggled in by night; love between men is doubly illicit. The grave tenderness that grows between Miquel and his father’s maltreated servant Manolo gives The Bridge its emotional centre. These young men salve the emptiness with a few quiet words and touches. We sense their youthful beauty and resilience, their suppleness in a place of fixity.
In fact, and with a fullness that’s striking in this novella of watchfulness and withholding, Miquel enters into a varied erotic life. Visits to the local town bring assignations. A later relationship between cellmates is extraordinarily vivid as Miquel seeks to “assuage his hunger by biting Odo, chewing him”. But it’s the lost, interrupted love of Manolo that gives shape to the rest.
A great alteration has come to the area in the form of a road bridge linking isolated settlements with the country beyond. Places “cut off and enclosed” for centuries are suddenly opened and connected. This central motif suggests a story concerned with social change, and certainly it could be described in those terms. There’s a potent scene in which dogs from both sides of the valley run wildly across the bridge, frenzied at the possibility of new mates. This is not the only moment of the feral, and the farcical. As for Miquel: the crossing should bring him a larger terrain for youthful exploration, but it casts him into peril and dire confinement. The Bridge stays in the mind less as a historically specific story of 20th-century development than as an ageless study of loss, betrayal and survival. Miquel himself comes to believe that “his isolation was nothing new, that he had always been far away even from those to whom he had been closest”.
Tóibín’s relationship with Catalonia now spans five decades. His first novel was set in Barcelona; his latest collection, The News from Dublin, includes several fine Spanish stories. He spends part of each year in the mountains near Llavorsí, and in writing about Miquel he is thinking his way into lives that have unfolded in that long known yet hardly knowable place. The germ of Miquel’s story came in a particular glimpse of local history. Tóibín was told that a ruined building was all that remained of the house where a woman once grew desperate enough to walk away from her family. It was said that the snow came; it was said to be a terrible tale. A Long Winter and The Bridge have grown from that beginning.
Tóibín responds powerfully to the qualities of exactitude and seriousness he finds in Catalan writing, in the work of Mercè Rodereda for instance, and these are very much qualities of The Bridge. We know that Miquel feels deeply, but nothing in his life has licensed or recommended the articulation of personal emotion. Tóibín practises a sustained reticence, even as fate strikes so cruelly as to give this story an absurdist edge.
Readers of Brooklyn and its follow-up Long Island will know that Tóibín has careful ways of handling a sequel: those novels are both richly complete in themselves while opening depths in each other. The Bridge, too, works alone or as part of a pair. To read A Long Winter afterwards, meeting the past that crouches in the shadows of the later story, would be as absorbing as to read chronologically. A further instalment seems possible. Any change would be welcome to lift Miquel from stultifying conditions, though it’s unlikely to offer much relief.
This is the kind of small volume temptingly piled by the checkouts at Christmas. I wouldn’t recommend it as a stocking-filler; the stocking would fall to the floor with the weight of sorrow. But this is a memorable short work in which Tóibín’s unsentimental prose is flawlessly matched to the austere worlds of people enduring, in their different ways, lives stripped back to the bone.
• The Bridge by Colm Tóibín is published by Picador (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
