Colm Tóibín on Stories of Exile (Part One)

Summary

Intelligence Squared – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Colm Tóibín on Stories of Exile (Part One)

Air Date: August 13, 2026
Host: Emma Brockes
Guest: Colm Tóibín
Setting: Live event at Union Chapel
Main Theme:
A probing live conversation with acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, exploring themes of exile, memory, migration, loss, and the quiet dramas of ordinary lives, marking the publication of his new short story collection, The News from Dublin.

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Overview of the Episode

This episode features a live dialogue between Emma Brockes and Colm Tóibín, focusing on the enduring motifs in Tóibín’s fiction: exile, memory, the sense of being out of place, and the quiet despair or hope that colors ordinary lives. With settings spanning Ireland, Spain, Argentina, and America—many of which Tóibín has lived in—the conversation reflects on both craft and politics, addressing how personal stories can evoke historical turbulence, and the writer’s place in a chaotic world.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Value of Writing Fiction in Troubled Times

• Emma Brockes begins by questioning the relevance of fiction—and particularly of nuanced, quiet stories—in a world facing crisis.
  • Colm Tóibín responds humorously:

    “You mean that if I wrote a better short story, Trump would lose the midterms even more?” (04:19)

  • He argues that fiction cannot fix politics, but testifies to how life proceeds amidst creeping threats, with ordinary people (himself included) becoming skilled at ignoring “creeping fascism.”

    "...if you thought, oh, I'll write a story that would help things, I mean, it really would be the end. So in other words, this is another example of how life tries to go on against all this.” (05:43)

Living with Exile, Migration, and Multiple Identities

• On Irish identity and American migration: Tóibín explains the irony of many Americans now seeking Irish citizenship as an EU passport, tracing the ways history flips expectations:

  “Who in history could have told you that... people descended from Irish people, as a way of getting into France, would use their Irish granny?” (08:05)

• He shares anecdotes from his life in New York and Los Angeles, highlighting what it means to live inside a bubble or as a migrant, often witnessing vulnerability—such as workers avoiding Home Depot to dodge ICE.

The Craft of Short Story Writing

• Returning to short stories after 15 years:

  “I can start a story where something moves into rhythm, where I get a sentence from an idea ... once I have the first page right, meaning every time I go back to it, I don't need to cross it out... it will go without much change.” (09:31)

  • He contrasts the shape of novels (consequences, plot) with short stories (moments, implication, restraint), invoking Thomas Hardy to illustrate.

• On creative persistence:

  “There's a terrible novel that I wrote and no one's ever going to see it... I keep thinking of taking little bits out of it and pretending they're short stories. That doesn't work either...” (14:39)

  • He humorously offers writing advice:

    “If you can control your Saturday night, you can write a novel. But if you can't, forget it.” (15:14)

Sympathy for Lives “Stuck” and the Theme of Exile

• Brockes notes Tóibín’s sympathy for “people who are flailing and failing… stuck in the wrong life.” Tóibín admits:

  “It's much easier to write about losers and chancers... someone who's completely messed up, you can actually work with that.” (19:23)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the ordinariness of ignoring political horror:

  “There's something going on about which we all need to know. I think about creeping fascism... people become really skilled, including me, at ignoring it...” (05:19)

• On Home Deportations:

  “[Home Depot] is where ICE comes to pick up illegal immigrants. And if you're illegal... you don't go near Home Depot.” (06:49)

• On writing process:

  “Once I have the first page right... I can come back to it and it will go.” (09:43)

• Advice to writers:

  “If you're in a pub at midnight on a Saturday night… forget it.” (15:14)

• On the pain and ambiguity of homecoming:

  “The actual leaving is just an anecdote... But the coming home is filled with, I suppose, irony, ambiguity, strangeness. And I think you can really work with it.” (27:50)

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Story Highlight: “Five Bridges” (Reading and Discussion)

• Story Background (20:03–27:23):
  Tóibín reads from his story "Five Bridges” about Paul, an Irish plumber illegally in California for 30 years who decides to self-deport as Trump’s second election looms. The story, years in the making, became urgent with recent political developments, capturing the emotional and logistical wrench of migration and return.

  • On fact vs. fiction:

    “[Wrote] most of the story, really, on the Saturday before Trump’s inauguration… the only thing I failed was the moon: I have the moon waning... we got it wrong in the New Yorker, and we got it right in the book.” (22:30)

  • Memorable quote:

    “You look illegal. There's nothing can be done about it. Why don't you get married? Why else do we have Americans, for God's sake?” (From the reading, ~24:20)

• On the irreversible consequences for migrants:

  “The real problem came a few years later when there would be an emergency at home... you can't go home to see them... you can't go to a wedding.” (27:50)

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Grappling with Taboos: “A Free Man” and Humanizing the Unforgivable

• Discussion of the story “A Free Man” set in Barcelona (32:54):
  Tóibín explores why he decided to write from the perspective of a convicted pedophile who cannot return to Ireland. He aimed to “dramatize ... what evil means, what evil looks like. And if you can make evil seem normal, what's the purpose of that?”

  • Most significant line:

    “...do you ever feel sorry for what you did?... and the guy, without thinking, says, 'I'm sorry, I was caught.'... it's the only thing maybe he says in the whole story that he means.” (38:16)

• The risk for a writer:

  “It creates such a squeamishness in the writer... What if I'm seen to be sympathizing with a sex offender?” (38:38)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Introduction & theme summary – 00:56–03:21
• On the role of fiction in dark times – 03:30–06:03
• Living as an émigré and the Irish-American dynamic – 06:16–09:01
• The craft and timing of short stories – 09:23–14:11
• Persistence, literary failure, & writer’s life advice – 14:11–16:03
• Sympathy for lost/lost characters – 18:35–20:03
• “Five Bridges” reading & discussion – 20:03–27:23
• On the pain/ambiguity of homecoming – 27:23–32:03
• Living in Spain and returning to past experiences – 32:03–32:54
• Tackling taboos in “A Free Man” – 32:54–39:00

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Conclusion

This rich, deeply personal conversation delves into the quiet but powerful dramas that define both Tóibín’s new collection and his life’s work. From the quiet pain of exile to the moral ambiguities faced by even the most outcast characters, Tóibín illuminates the spaces where public events intersect with private lives, blending empathy, irony, and sharp literary insight.
Whether addressing the politics of migration, memory, loss, or the nature of moral evil, the episode offers a nuanced meditation on fiction’s enduring power to bear witness—even, and perhaps especially, when the world feels most unstable.

Transcript

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[Mia Sorrenti]

welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with award winning novelist Colm Toybean. Toybean is widely acclaimed for the emotional restraint and quiet power of his prose. His novels include Nora Webster, Brooklyn, which was turned into a film starring Saoirse Ronan and its sequel, Long Island. Toybean joined us at Union Chapel to discuss fiction, memory and the lives shaped by migration and loss marking the publication of his new short story collection, the News from Dublin. Toybean reflects on the quiet dramas that define ordinary lives, from grief and exile to belonging and home. He also discusses the enduring themes that have shaped his work and how fiction can illuminate moments of profound historical change through deeply personal stories. Let's join our host, Emma Brocks, now live at Union Chapel.

[Emma Brockes]

Hello, thanks very much for braving the Storms to come out here tonight. I'm thrilled to be here with Kom Toibin. He is the author of 11 novels, including the Master, which is about Henry James, the Magician, about Thomas Mann and his global best sellers Brooklyn and its follow up Long Island. His work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. He has won many prestigious awards, including the Costa Novel Award and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He's here tonight to discuss the News from Dublin, a new collection of short stories, and the order of events, loosely, is that he and I will have a chat. He will do a reading from one of the stories, we'll have a bit more of a chat and then we'll throw the floor open to you guys for questions. The nine stories in the book are set in Ireland, Spain, Argentina and America, all of which you've lived In Yep. And they explore the recurring themes from his work, including silence, loss, exile, ambivalence. And the thing I think of most pressingly in relation to Colm, which is the experience of being stuck in the wrong life, which always strikes fear into my soul in all the iterations across all your work. It's his first collection of short stories in 15 years. Colm, welcome.

[Colm Tóibín]

Thank you very much. Thank you.

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Thank you.

[Emma Brockes]

So we'll get into the nitty gritty of the stories in a minute. I had a first question which harks back to the last time you and I met, which was in 2018, in your office at Columbia University in New York. Trump was in the White House. Brexit had just been voted through, but it was a gentler time. Incredibly, since then, the world has spun off its axis. I wondered whether you ever have to sort of persuade yourself that writing fiction in general and short stories in particular, given that they turn on tiny nuances in a world that's on fire, whether you have to ever persuade yourself that it makes a difference, that it's a reasonable thing to be doing in these insane times.

[Colm Tóibín]

You mean that if I wrote a better short story, Trump would lose the midterms even more?

[Emma Brockes]

Yes,

[Colm Tóibín]

I think you really would be deluding yourself. What's really strange in America now is the ordinariness of things, is that everyone's carrying on that the worst thing could happen that day, and you would meet people that evening and nobody would mention it. And that I have been with this book. I've been around the place. I've been in Nashville. You know, I've been in a lot of. I've been in Santa Fe. And you could think America is the nicest place on God's earth. They got this beautiful country, and they just are so charming as people. They've read so many books. They're just so brilliant. Until you read the news and then you realize, where are the other people? Where's Mitch McConnell? When I need, I need him in the audience to know that. So there's something going on about which we all need to know. I think about creeping fascism is that people become really skilled, including me, at ignoring it, pretending it's just another day. And someone says, well, do you know they have concentration camps? You know, there's someone who's in one of those camps, who's Irish, who was detained for being illegal, came on Irish radio and said, just in the afternoon, one afternoon, then, no, the real problem here is that you're afraid of being beaten to death by the Guards. You go, what did he just say? And then you think, well, what am I doing about that? And the answer is nothing. And this goes on another day and another day. And so if you thought, oh, I'll write a story that would help things, I mean, I really would be the end. So in other words, this is another example of how life tries to go on against all this.

[Emma Brockes]

Yes. Do you feel particularly vulnerable to that sense of existing in a bubble where it's easy to ignore in New York? I mean, it's a liberal enclave. You're in the university, although the university itself has been subject to.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, you don't feel that as much at Columbia University because those, those battles were fought even before Trump. Once the students began to protest. You realize that there are people running Columbia University who don't like, protest and want to stop it and will call in the police to drag some of my students off the campus in really vicious handcuffs, painful handcuffs. But I'm in Los Angeles a lot. My boyfriend's in Los Angeles. And yeah, in Los Angeles, you could have a lovely game of tennis, you could wander around. The sun is shining, the pomegranates are growing, the passion fruit's over there. And the little, little moments, you know, there was a guy who was building something, doing something with a wall, and he just would come. He was coming for a few days and he just said, the second day, well, I won't be able to get the supplies tomorrow. I wonder if, could one of you guys go and get them? I said, like, what's the problem? He said, well, Home Depot. Home Depot is where ICE comes to pick up illegal immigrants. And if you're illegal in the morning, you don't go near Home Depot. So one of us would have to go to get the supplies for him. We didn't even ask him was he legal or illegal, but we presumed from that that he was vulnerable. Just an ordinary remark said. And he said it in the most ordinary way. And in the morning we went and got the stuff for him, and we're playing the game. So that's the way these things happen.

[Emma Brockes]

A lot of high profile people who have second or third passports have obviously used them and left. Have you felt that this has sort of so radically changed your relationship with the country that you can't be there for a long time?

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, I got a passport just a few years ago, and someone said to me recently, that wasn't a good move, was it? But it was in the sense it leaves me free not to be deported, you know, not to have my emails being, I suppose, being checked by them. But one of the things is that you can get Irish citizenship almost automatically if you have one Irish grandparent. And I'm meeting a lot of people who have done this and are delighted, but partly they're delighted because they're going to be able to live in France as a result, or in Italy. It's not that they're really desperate to be in the Irish Midlands over a long winter, but what a funny idea from history that. Who in history could have told you that there would come a time when. When people descended from Irish people, as a way of getting into France, would use their Irish granny, You know, like, it's just the most, like the ironies of that, you know?

[Emma Brockes]

Well, you say in one of the short stories, I think it's in sleep. You say, it's easy to be Irish. Now it's an older man being cross, questioned by his younger boyfriend, who asks, do you hate the English? And who, you know, has many outdated notions about Ireland. And the narrator corrects him.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yes, I think the young guy gets the best line because he's Jewish. And the sort of me character says, well, Germany comes in many guises. I'm thinking about the Thomas Mann book. And Germany comes in many guises. And the young guy says, not for us. I mean, sometimes those history things have remained as dark as ever.

[Emma Brockes]

So this is the first time you've put out a book of short stories for 15 years. I wonder what drove you back to the form, which makes it sound like it's a punishment.

[Colm Tóibín]

Oh, no, I'd written some and then I thought I should write some more. And then it was going to be a book, and then there were three stories. I can start a story where something moves into rhythm, where I get a sentence from an idea. I get a sentence. It could be a character or a configuration or just a drama. And then I write the first paragraph, maybe the first page, and I do that over and over in longhand. I cross it out, I write it again, I change words, I then put it onto a laptop and I keep doing that. And once I have the first page. Right, meaning. Right, meaning that every time I go back to it, I don't need to cross it out or make changes. I can leave it for as long as I want and I can come back to it and it will go. Then from that point onwards, it will go without much change or just as long as I get that opening right. So I had a few things like that. And when the book was coming at A year's notice, I wrote three extra ones that I had planned. So, yeah, it was just a bit of a. I always knew I was going to do it because I had a few waste not, want not, you know, and then you do something. Yeah, so it was.

[Emma Brockes]

But from what I've read, I think you wrote a piece in the Guardian about the gestation of some of the stories. They can sit in your mind for 15 years in one case, 30 years in another.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, the longer the better, in the sense that every so often your mind goes back to it and it. It sort of stays, you know, you don't write anything more down, but as you're walking around and wandering around, something more occurs to you. And so you've been living with the character or living with the situation, and by the time you come back to it, you actually. Yeah, you can get it in much more detail. It can become, I suppose, more convincing to you and maybe hope more plausible for the reader under those conditions.

[Emma Brockes]

And is there never a scenario in which it dies in those. Because I'm thinking about a very different writer, Liz Gilbert, but she's very much of the opinion that you use it or lose it, that there's a finite time for cooking it, and if you don't get it down in that time, then it will go to someone else.

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[Colm Tóibín]

No, no. The longer. I think the longer it would go on, the better. And, you know, it isn't as though a short story becomes a novel or that it could, in the sense that. I think the difference between the two forms maybe, is. I think of Thomas Hardy as the mayor of Casterbridge, say. And in the opening of that book, the opening chapter is where a man, his wife and their daughter come into a town. I think it's the 1830s, southern England. And he gets drunk. There are auctions and fairs going on in the town. He gets drunk and he puts his wife up for sale, who will buy this woman? And a dark stranger over there says he will, and he buys her and he walks out of the town with her that evening, leaving the drunken husband behind. The configuration now is the man, the dark stranger, the wife and the daughter. And no matter what you do, that's a novel, you know. In other words, something is. There have to be consequences from this action, so that. What a novel. I suppose it has a plot, a plot being an action, and the consequences of that action, which are, as I said, have to be plausible, but not actually predictable. But nonetheless, those people are going to emerge again. Something is going to reverberate but if you wrote a story, it could be that man comes in with his wife and his daughter. They see the fair. He feels for a moment a sudden urge. Imagine if I could sell both of them, I would. But it's an ugly thought that just doesn't last. But she sort of sees it or feels it, and there's something in the air between that's wrong. And then they go to the inn they're staying and they put the daughter into the room, and then nothing more happens. That's a short story. So that business of him having that thought and her seeing it or sensing it, that should take a lot of work. A lot of cutting back. Explain it too much. It goes. But. But it has to be clear to the reader. But maybe in half sentences or something. Felt. But if you go, you know, she sensed for a moment that he was having an ugly thought. That's awful. You can't do that. It has to be that something or other just she saw. Then you go, that's not working today. Will I push it today or will I come back to it tomorrow? Will I try it? And so there's a lot of struggle in not explaining. Not over explaining, not even showing or telling. Just doing something in between showing and telling. It's a delicate process. You could break it really easily.

[Emma Brockes]

Is it ever the case? I think I saw you talking about giving up recently, that you should always finish. You should always finish a piece. And I wondered whether there's ever a situation in which you've been over and over and over and over it. And I'm sure there are people here who are struggling with books and may have been lying to their agent for weeks about how far along they are with it, which I think is a very normal thing to do. But have you ever abandoned a piece because it just. You slam into the wall?

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah. I mean, there's a terrible novel that I wrote and no one's ever going to see it. And it's great. I keep thinking of taking little bits out of it and pretending they're short stories. That doesn't work either. But I mean, you know that you get wheeled out as some sort of eminence on the whole subject of fiction and especially, you know, you get brought into a university and you get brought into a classroom and the students all want some guidance. They don't really want some guidance. But the whole thing is that that's what you must do, give them guidance. And I started to tell them that the only thing they need to watch when they're working is Saturday night that if you can control your Saturday night, you can write a novel. But if you can't control your Saturday night, forget it. You'll never write a novel because you'll be hungover on Sunday and then Monday you'll be tired. Like the whole week will go. And the students look so horrified. This guy's come all the way from Ireland, of all places, to tell them that it's all about this Saturday night business. And they want to know, what about openings? What about adverbs? Or what about backstory? What about, you know, can you. How do you feel about backstory? I say do what you like with backstory, but if you're in a pub at midnight on a Saturday night, you forget. Forget it.

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[Colm Tóibín]

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[Colm Tóibín]

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[Emma Brockes]

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[Emma Brockes]

And yet one thing that strikes me, reading your work and this collection in particular, is you have a great sympathy for people who are flailing and failing and who are slightly hopeless. I mean, particularly the men. I think there are a lot of very adept women in a lot of your work. I'm thinking of Nancy in the chip shop in Long Island. And there are a lot of men who are sort of struggling and failing. Which brings me to this business of being stuck in the wrong life. It strikes me that you must have been a young man at some point who saw different forks going away from you, one of which presumably would have been to stay in Ireland and possibly had a presentiment that if you didn't take the right path, you would be stuck and hopeless and in the wrong life.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, I think surely we all have a what if. But I think it's. You see, it's much easier to write about losers and chancers than it is to write about very successful men who come into the room and know what they're doing and women love them and they're good fathers and they're good lovers and they're good with money and the bank manager, you know, like that, like what's for me in that, you know. But someone who's completely messed up, you can actually work with that. Someone who stay, you know, someone who stays in New York on a tourist visa for 30 years or in San Francisco in the case of this book. It's a much easier story to write than someone who went and got his green card.

[Emma Brockes]

Yes, yes. It would cut off certain dramatic possibilities. Yes. So that's the story that you're going to read from, which is called Five Bridges. Just to give some background. Yes. It's about an Irish man who has been illegally in California for 30 years and sees which way the wind is going with Trump's second election and decides that he better self deport. But it had been in your mind for 16 years before it was pre Trump by a Longchamp.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, but I was teaching in California and it came to the end of that time and I thought I wouldn't be back for any length of time. And with three friends, I went on a hike up the hill into Muir woods. And there was a lodge at the top where if you brought your own food, you could cook it. And it was one of those days. It was just so beautiful. The trees were beautiful. Everything was beautiful. The night sky, the Pacific Ocean. And it was just that funny feeling, I'm losing this. Even though I've just been here teaching for a while, I'm losing it. I'm not going to be back here. And funny feeling, already nostalgic for it. And that's Moore's last sigh. You get brought up in the most beautiful place. It thinking, I'm going home next week. And so I had that written down as an opening. And then Trump got elected, as you say, the second time. And it was much more ominous. It was much nastier. It was very clear that the enemy he was going to select, of all things, were migrants, and that he was going to lead this movement against migrants, and that he was going to. That ice was going to become a sort of. A sort of storm trooper for him. And that. I had this Irish guy in my head still, because I've been. I'd made a plumber out of Tony, the guy in Long Island. And so this guy's a plumber, and he's on call. And then he has a daughter who he split up with her mother, but he bonded with her when she's aged around 11, and he's crazy about her. And if he goes home to Ireland, he will never get back into America. He will miss her teenage years. She would have to come to Ireland to see him. So what I did was I waited after Trump was elected, and I wrote most of the story. I wrote the body of the story, really, on the Saturday before Trump's inauguration, getting up really early in the morning and working all day, because that's when most of the story happens. That's when they do the hike where the daughter says, my mother doesn't like you. My stepfather doesn't like you. But imagine if we all loved one another for one day and we went on a hike and we all agreed on everything, and I'm in charge that day and that's what I want. So they all did it for her. And it's the Saturday before Trump's inauguration, so I'm writing it. I've never done that before in Los Angeles, in the same time zone on the day. The only thing I failed with it was just, I have the moon waning, just because I like the word waning. But you can't just like a word someone pointed out to me. Since you've given a precise date, we know what date it is, the moon was waxing because I published it first in the New Yorker, which is famous for its fact checker, but the fact checker just didn't think the moon could be fact checked, I suppose. And we got it wrong in the New Yorker, and we got it right in the book. And the guy who made the changes acknowledged in the acknowledgments, but so that when they can't find parking in the morning at a quarter to 10, I'm at a quarter to 10, you know, getting them a parking space. And so by the end of that day, I had most of it done. I'd written a good lot of it before as well. And then the aim was to get Paul, this guy, out of America before Trump speaks on an inauguration day on a director lingus from San Francisco to Dublin. But this is just where he has a friend who. It's in two of the stories, just as, you know, you find a plumber, you think that's a good job in a novel because he sort of freelance and all sorts of things can happen to him in various people's houses. And as happens indeed in Long Island, Paul's not like that. He's a different sort of guy. But he has a friend who runs an Irish bar. So there are two stories in which that's happened. It's a sort of funny new thing where it's like being a priest, you know, if you're in real trouble, you go to the guy who runs the Irish bar and this bar is called the Greyhound Inn. So this is Paul, who's the plumber, and he's talking to his friend who's called Sinnet, who is the barman or is the sort of bar manager in the Greyhound Inn. The night after the election, Paul went. Oh, sorry, it's called the Greyhound track. It must have been a Greyhound inn in some draft. The night after the election, Paul went to the Greyhound track where he found Sinnett, who joined him at the bar. They won't deport me, Sinhat said. I got married to a nice local girl as soon as I arrived. I was always grateful to her. What about you? If they saw you coming along the street, they'd deport you on the spot. You look illegal. There's nothing can be done about it. Why don't you get married? Why else do we have Americans, for God's sake? What else are they for? I could even find you a fellow who would marry you for your rugged good looks and all that. I don't want to marry anyone, paul said. How much money do you have? That's what I wanted to ask you. Have you ever met anyone who has a load of readies and needs to know what to do with them wrapped in socks? How did you know? Cinder put out his arms as though seeking applause. Stop talking shite, paul said. Sinnets sipped a coffee and looked around. How much in Ready's? He asked. A lot for me. Do you have a bank account? Just about. I keep enough money in it to pay the bills and I lodge the checks I get. Otherwise it's cash. Your customers must resent you. That cash thing might work at home, but people don't like it here. It'll backfire eventually. The people here prefer to be crooked while pretending to be holy. And if Ice or whoever finds you on a job putting in one of your famous washers, they'll take you away and they'll visit your apartment while you're being held and you can say goodbye to your cash.

[Emma Brockes]

Huh?

[Colm Tóibín]

They would steal it? No, not that. But they but while they were still counting it, you would be on your way to the airport or whatever new way they might have of sending a fellow like you home. You think it's funny? I think you should take the law into your own hands and get out of here, cash in suitcase before they put you out. You think they're serious about it? In the first month or so, yeah, they'll do it for show. If I tried to leave the country, are you sure I wouldn't be detained on the way out? You know the drill. They would let you out easy enough, but they'd never let you back in. I came when I was 18. You grew up here. So I have a daughter here, I told you. Maybe some president in the future will soften up on the plight of Irish plumbers and their American daughters, but it will take a while.

[Emma Brockes]

It's a fantastic story. It also gets around the problem, which I wonder whether you've had to consciously address as you're writing, which is as the world has gotten smaller, as tech has gotten bigger, it's harder to banish people and them not be able to come back or not to be at the end of it. You somehow create in this story a sense of the absolute irreversible steps that he's taking. That's quite hard to evoke these days, where people just go anywhere at the drop of a hat.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, but I mean, that has happened with a Lot of Irish people who stayed on. It was fun at the beginning to stay on in Boston and not bother about your passport or your visa. The real problem came a few years later when there would be an emergency at home, get a phone call, and everyone who Irish has lived in America. That idea of the phone call or 10 emails, when you open emails saying, call home now, where someone is sick or your parents have died and you can't go to the funeral and you know, you can't go home to see them when they're sick and you can't go, you know, can't go to a wedding. So there's a lot of Irish people have lived under those conditions. And you become acutely conscious of a funny Irish thing in America where you end up going home. And I don't think it happens here as much, but you go to jfk, say, the airport, and you're so busy, it's so hard to get to the airport. You're just not thinking and you're always late for the flight and you're running and suddenly you see the Irish. How do you know they're Irish? Well, you just know they're Irish. There's a funny way of Irish people pushing a trolley through an airport and they're never sure. And there's a sort of pullover Irish guys are still wearing that's gone out everywhere else. And there's a sort of pullover, like a general nervousness about these public, big American public spaces. And, you know, we're all so frightened by America, where they say, you know, you go in to get a coffee and they say to you, like, is this to stay or to go? I think I'd like to have it here. Maybe some of it here, maybe I might take. So if you maybe put the to stay or to go. Well, if you put somebody in the cupboard, then I'd take the rest. Oh, shut up. Why am I living in this country where people won't listen to me? And then you get on the airplane and the cabin crew is so nice, and the air hostess is here. Lingus air hostess, like, would you like more tea? And it's just so nice. And then you feel, I'm going home with all my people. I don't know what I was doing in New York ever. And the problem is then that it does. You can't trust that feeling. It doesn't last. And if it's Christmas time, it's the worst because you go home and you find that, you know, the pub, you taught everyone, you still. No one goes to that pub anymore. And they sort of look at you like you're insane to say, well, when we go to Mulligan's, we never go to Mulligan's anymore. What are you talking about? And then you find your friends that all have children and they're staying home with their wives. And then suddenly you find that some aunt has come to visit, and she looks at you and says, and you never thought of getting married yourself? And your bed, you want to say to your mother, you know, that mattress has seen better days. If you said that, it would be the end. Is there something wrong with the mattress? Do they have better mattresses in America? And then the next thing, like this could be the 23rd of December. And then the next thing could be like a vicious hangover that you didn't mean to have. You ended with, you know, and someone tells you, in fact, that you met some old friend, that someone actually never liked you at all. Do you remember that night? And just the whole place becomes much stranger than anywhere you've ever gone in America. And you've got another week to go. So that whole business, I think that going out, the actual leaving is just an anecdote. It's just something that as a writer, I can't do anything with. But the coming home is filled with, I suppose, irony, ambiguity, strangeness. And I think you can really work with it. And so I think a lot of these stories are just, you know, people who are locked in some country think that Ireland is where they're from or Spain is where they're from. The longest story. And then when you go back there, it's just, oh, God. So you get caught between. Yeah, you get this cliche. You get caught between two places, you know, But, I mean, I was looking. I was trying to write about this. And, you know, in the Odyssey, even Homer is worried about this. When Odysseus is 20 years away, and when he comes home, he decides to dress up as a beggar just to ironize, just to make the moment even stranger than it would be. And all his old friends don't recognize him and they insult him. So that that whole business of the sort of the politics or the poetics of homecoming are, you know, something I can work with.

[Emma Brockes]

Your first exile was, well, it's a grand word for you went to Spain after you graduated.

[Colm Tóibín]

I did, yeah. Yeah.

[Emma Brockes]

But I never been sure of how long that.

[Colm Tóibín]

Three years.

[Emma Brockes]

Oh, it did okay. And Spain crops up a lot in these stories. I wonder why you went back in your mind to that period or.

[Colm Tóibín]

Well, I went back then to Spain to write the book about Barcelona, homage to Barcelona, 10 years later. And then I started to go there, you know, for quite a lot then over all the years, particularly to a place in the High Pyrenees called the Paliar, which is a very remote place, and it has the air of an Irish village or an Irish town. There's just five or six towns there. And so I've sort of. I've got to know that play. I went first in 76 up there, so it's a good long stretch that comes up a lot.

[Emma Brockes]

There's a story called A Free man set in Barcelona, and it's another example of someone who can't go back to Ireland because he is a convicted pedophile and has been cast aside by his family. It's a fascinating story purely because it touches a taboo, which is to try and not create sympathy in any way, but to humanize in three dimensions a figure who is beyond the pale. And I wondered how you got to that place of deciding to wrestle with that just as a writing challenge.

[Colm Tóibín]

Yeah, I suppose the first thing is that I was worried that I was writing too much about nice people and when there seemed to be fewer and fewer of them, you know, and also, you know, that if you think of all the things going on in the world, are you never touching on. I mean, when the Jeffrey Epstein thing happened, I watched for a moment if him or Ghislaine Maxwell, there was going to be a moment where they were going to say, look, I'm really sorry for what happened, that these victims, like, it's awful what I did, and you're not hearing that. And so then I started to imagine we were seeing a lot of. In Ireland, there's a very big distinction between ordinary, decent criminals, you know, ODC and sex offenders. And the ordinary, decent people won't share a prison with the sex offenders. And so. But a lot of the ordinary decenters went to Spain when they were released or before they were even found. And they were always being photographed by the tabloid press, drinking sangria in some bar on the coast of Dajur, some coast south of Malaga. And Larry so and so is living it up, you know, and there'd be Big Larry with his sangria. And it struck me that if. That some of the pedophiles were also. Some of them were becoming well known in the sense of them being photographed, the same photograph appearing over and over in the paper. And I imagined a character who. There was a big controversy about his pension, that he worked as A teacher. And on release from prison, he was going to get his pension. And therefore he was being photographed. And he was photographed coming out of prison. So that in the days after he's in prison, he's fully recognizable to an entire Irish population. And the problem is where he can go. Now, if he's a priest, and there is the diocese, the Archdiocese of Dublin has a way of dealing with that. Where there's a house found, there's a lot of surveillance checking on him. But he's not a priest, and his family has disowned him. He's literally alone. And the only place he can go. He got a letter from an old friend in Barcelona saying, if you're ever in real trouble, come here. The friend doesn't really mean it. He just writes to him, but he thinks, that's where I'll go. He gets on a plane that very day and he goes to Barcelona. And his worry is that he's going to be chased on the street. He has to sign up, sign once a week as a sex offender on the register. But of course, his life is about how to rebuild his life. How to get an apartment, how to get a bank account. So I'm dealing with the world from his perspective. And I realize that the reader is now being lured into seeing things as he sees them. What do you do with that, then? Like, why? What's the purpose of this, I suppose, is to dramatize. This is a very dramatic story subject. This is a burning question as to what evil means, what evil looks like. And if you can make evil seem normal, what's the purpose of that? And so you just keep working. I mean, the whole business. You stay home on a Saturday night, you know, you don't go out and see how this goes. And there's a moment came where this friend of his, who is the barman who manages a bar, sort of sits there all day. He partly wants to see him because he's bored managing the bar. And this guy is sort of able to tell him things like, what was it like when the first Jesuit arrived in the pedophile prison? Like, did that change things? Those sort of things. But he casually says he makes clear to him one day that he thinks he's fishing for an invitation for Christmas to the man's house. And the man says, oh, no, my wife now wouldn't have that meaning he wouldn't have you in our house. So there are moments like that. But one day he says to him, do you ever feel sorry for what you did? Just in ordinary Conversation. And the guy, without thinking says, I'm sorry, I was caught. And I write that down like it just comes next as the next sentence. Because the alternative doesn't work. If he says, I'm so deeply sorry, oh, my Lord, I'm hearty sorry for having offended thee. You know, if it goes into, it sounds like he's speaking in court or he's saying something he doesn't mean. If he says how sorry he feels that the language of sorry, it's sort of language people use in court, you're never sure they mean it. And politicians who say sorry are generally not sorry. But I write it. I think I'll deal with that later. I just leave it there for the moment. But I never found another way of having him say something that's actually true, you know, and I left it there. I'm still uneasy about it, you know,

[Emma Brockes]

interesting, because for me that line does so much work because it exposes his essential coldness. And, you know, as with all good fiction, it does invite empathy. You can't, as you see, you're seeing everything from his point of view. You do start to feel sympathy.

[Colm Tóibín]

And then you go, yeah, I've just been caught, you know, feeling empathy for somebody who's just said that. And that's the only thing maybe he says in the whole story that he means.

[Emma Brockes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Colm Tóibín]

And ha, you know, in other words. And that came in one second, you know, if I'd worked on it, I would have got something that didn't seem as. I don't know. Anyway, it's a difficult subject to write about.

[Emma Brockes]

Yeah, it was fascinating, I thought. Exactly as you say. You never see this tackled because I think it creates such a squeamishness in the writer. What if I'm seen to be sympathizing with a sex offender?

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligent Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a [e-mail] membership and if you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets [e-mail] attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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