Colm Tóibín's The Bridge continues

Colm Tóibín has published a new novella, The Bridge, set in the Catalan Pyrenees. It continues the story of Miquel, a character first introduced twenty years ago in the earlier work A Long Winter.

A year has passed since Miquel's mother walked out of their house and disappeared into the snow. He now lives a harsh existence with his unyielding father on their isolated farm. The sheep graze the high summer pastures. A side hustle smuggling contraband provides some needed cash. In this bare and lonely place, warmth of feeling is itself a kind of smuggled good. Love between men is doubly illicit.

The emotional centre of the story forms between Miquel and Manolo, his father's maltreated servant. Their relationship is built on grave tenderness. Quiet words and touches salve the emptiness. The narrative conveys their youthful beauty and resilience in a landscape of fixity.

Erotic life and loss

Miquel enters a varied erotic life, a striking fullness in a novella of watchfulness. Visits to the local town bring assignations. A later relationship in a prison cell is vividly portrayed, with Miquel seeking to assuage his hunger by biting Odo, chewing him. Yet it is the lost and interrupted love for Manolo that shapes everything that follows for Miquel.

The bridge as motif

A great change has come to the area: a new road bridge. It links isolated settlements with the country beyond. Places cut off and enclosed for centuries are suddenly opened. This central motif suggests a story of social change. In one potent scene, dogs from both sides of the valley run wildly across the bridge, frenzied by the possibility of new mates. This moment is both feral and farcical.

For Miquel, the crossing should offer a larger terrain for exploration. Instead, it casts him into peril and dire confinement. The reviewer notes that The Bridge lingers less as a specific story of 20th-century development than as an ageless study of loss, betrayal, and survival. Miquel 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 Catalan connection

Colm Tóibín's relationship with Catalonia spans five decades. His first novel was set in Barcelona. His latest collection, The News from Dublin, includes several Spanish stories. He spends part of each year in the mountains near Llavorsí. In writing about Miquel, he thinks his way into lives that have unfolded in that long-known yet hardly knowable place.

The germ of Miquel's story came from a glimpse of local history. Tóibín was told a ruined building was all that remained of a house where a woman grew desperate enough to walk away from her family. The snow came. It was said to be a terrible tale. Both A Long Winter and The Bridge grew from that beginning.

The reviewer states that Tóibín responds to the exactitude and seriousness he finds in Catalan writing, such as in the work of Mercè Rodoreda. These are qualities of The Bridge. Miquel feels deeply, but nothing in his life has licensed the articulation of personal emotion. Tóibín practises a sustained reticence, even as fate strikes cruelly enough to give the story an absurdist edge.

A careful sequel

Readers of Brooklyn and Long Island know Tóibín has careful ways of handling a sequel. Those novels are complete yet open depths in each other. The Bridge also works alone or as part of a pair. Reading A Long Winter afterwards, meeting the past that crouches in the shadows of the later story, would be as absorbing as reading chronologically. A further instalment seems possible. Any change would be welcome to lift Miquel from stultifying conditions, though it is unlikely to offer much relief.

The Bridge is published by Picador. The reviewer concludes it is a memorable short work where Tóibín's unsentimental prose is flawlessly matched to austere worlds of people enduring lives stripped back to the bone.