I thought of the grey seascapes and the sense of isolation in the black-and-white early films of Ingmar Bergman. I tried to find a calmer style for The Heather Blazing than I had used in The South and a more stable structure. As I worked on the first chapters of the book in the Hotel Continental in Tangiers in the late summer of 1987, my mind was filled with images of Enniscorthy in the years before I was born, the death of my grandfather in 1940, for example, and the death of his youngest son, my uncle, from tuberculosis, a few weeks later. I mixed these in with my own life in the time when my father, who was a teacher, founded the museum in Enniscorthy Castle and I went with him and a local priest to visit houses in the countryside that had artefacts from the past, including pike-heads used by the rebels in 1798.
In Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Bergman’s Persona I had noticed how powerful the idea of the blurring of identities was, or letting memory and imagination fade into each other. I let that happen in The Heather Blazing as I blurred what had happened to my father in his life with memories of my own. Eamon Redmond was both of us in some ways, and neither of us in others. But the atmosphere of the town and the coast belonged to a life I knew as much as the protagonist of the novel did.
As with The South and the novel I wrote next, The Story of the Night, and later The Master, I wrote some early chapters of The Heather Blazing and then left the book aside, unsure how to proceed, uneasy about the emotions which the early chapters had stirred up. I spent 1988 in Spain without writing a word of the novel, and then spent a year writing a book about Barcelona and travelling in a new expanded Europe following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Finally, towards the end of 1990, I went to Budapest and moved into a small room in a cheap, modern hotel near the railway station. It was freezing outside. I did not speak a word of the language. I did not know anyone. The streets were filled with Romanians and others looking for work, but the cafes and the opera house were from an older world, with echoes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In that place of old tensions and loyalties and new freedom I worked every day and most nights on my novel, conjuring up people I had known, or half known, or heard about, and houses I had lived in before I went to Dublin. I used the eroding cliffs at Cush not as metaphor, but as themselves, exactly as they were when we went there each summer, but with all the resonance which lost things can have, things which cannot be recovered except in words.
In 1992, when a proof of the book had been printed, I gave it to a lawyer to read. I was warned by him to remove Chapter One of Part Two which contained material which might suggest that my judge was based on a real judge still presiding at that time. I hastily re-wrote the offending chapter. Since twenty years have passed, many of those who served on the bench have died. The character of Eamon Redmond, in any case, was not based on any one of them. That original chapter is published here for the first time in its proper place.
© BRUCE WEBER
Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
For more on this author, visit: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Colm-Toibin/
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COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MARION DEUCHARS
Also by Colm Tóibín
FICTION
The South
The Story of the Night
The Blackwater Lightship
The Master
Mothers and Sons
Brooklyn
The Empty Family
The Testament of Mary
NONFICTION
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border
Homage to Barcelona
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar
Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush
All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
PLAYS
Beauty in a Broken Place
Testament
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Colm Tóibín
Afterword Copyright © 2012 by The Heather Blazing Ltd.
Originally published in Great Britain in 1992 by Pan Books Limited
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First Scribner trade paperback edition September 2012
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012030135
ISBN 978-1-4767-0450-0 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4767-0447-0 (eBook)
Colm Toibin, The Heather Blazing
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