The Heather Blazing (2008)

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At Boolavogue as the sun was setting O'er the bright May meadows of Shelmalier, A rebel hand set the heather blazing and brought the neighbours from far and near.Toibin’s writing is beautiful and lyrical and the title comes from the first verse of a song as recorded above. It recalls the Irish rebellion of 1798 which was brutally put down by the British (as usual). The novel tells the story of Eamon Redmond an Irish High Court judge, alternating between past and present telling the story of his childhood and his later life. Remond is a leading member of Fianna Fail and we also see the changing nature of that party with real history intruding as De Valera and Haughey play minor roles.The star of this novel is the Irish countryside; the land and the sea of the south-east coast, of Wexford and Limerick. Redmond comes across as a rather cold character and we are taken through a couple of judgments he makes early in the book which make the reader tend to dislike him. His family, especially his wife Carmel, also find him distant and difficult to know. We follow Redmond from his childhood and his relationship with his father, through courtship and starting out in law to legal eminence and widowhood. There is an epiphany at the end, but it is very late; too late for many of those who know him. The troubles are in the background, but still a presence and there are some indications of Redmond’s family involvements in the uprisings that led to independence. Later as a judge the troubles forma backdrop, but they are secondary to the tale. Communication is a key theme; Redmond’s inability to communicate on an emotional level, his father’s struggles to communicate after a stroke and the embarrassment Eamon felt when he was in his father’s class at school. The communication issues extend to his children as well. There are other juxtapositions as well. At the Redmond’s holiday home the sea is eroding the land; as a judge his decisions relate to the rights of society as opposed to the rights of the individual, Death is also ever present and as a child Redmond describes the death of relatives and the rites and rituals of the Catholic Church (also ever present). Irish history permeates the novel; Redmond is a pillar of the Fianna Fail establishment, his father was a message carrier for the IRA.Although simply and lyrically written; there is a thread of complexity within because Toibin is examining the republican ideology of the Irish state and the social reality of its population and the tensions with the Catholic Church. It is a critique of the way the Irish state has developed, written in 1992, which seems even more pertinent today. But it is a critique from a position of support with a strong sense of the immersion in history and landscape. It’s really rather good. The only problem is that we spend all our time with Eamon Redmond and he isn’t that likeable.
—Paul

“Heather Burning”, published in 1992, is the second of Colm Tóibín’s novels. And even though it is one of his earliest works, it has all of the marks that distinguish him as one of the best of our contemporary writers.Each of Tóibín’s novels creates a person of flesh and blood—a person whom we see in the breadth of their souls and minds. Not all of them are always likeable, but they are always real and understandable in their complexities:•tKatherine Proctor, in “The South”, who, abandoning her family and Ireland, struggles for her independence and identity in the harsh environment of post civil war Spain;•tRichard Garay, in “The Story of the Night”, who, during the time of Argentina’s Generals, finds eventual stability, comfort and acceptance as a gay man with AIDS;•tHelen O’Doherty, in “Blackwater Lightship”, who reconnects with her family and her brother, as that family comes to grips with his dying;•tHenry James, in “The Master”, on the verge of some of his most effective and creative literary creations;•tEilis Lacey, in “Brooklyn”, who, as part of the European migration to the United States in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, commits under duress to a new future in a foreign land.Here are real people who struggle with their lives and their relationships and who are rooted in real times and in real places—characters who deal with life’s critical issues including exile, solitude, apartness, loss and death and who, by the end, come to some type of resolution to their turmoil or acceptance of their circumstances.Eamon Redmond, in “The Heather Burning”, is the second of Tóibín’s creations. Tóibín traces Eamon’s life from his youth through the death of his wife, Carmel, sometime in the 1970s. That life, linked in some measure to the Irish Republican Party of Fianna Fil, plays out along the southeastern Irish coast.Eamon , a judge in Ireland’s high court, is a private person. There is a part of him that projects a coolness, a disengagement, a barrier that even those close to him fail to penetrate. He seems overly analytical, strongly practical, intensely inner-focused at times. But he is deeply attached to the land of his youth, whose slow coastal erosion emerges as a metaphor for his own aging. And he is also, we learn, deeply attached to his wife, whose death he can barely accept. It is out of that last struggle that regeneration seems possible through the emerging ties to his new grandson.
—Jay

This is a book about the silences that occur between people and the difficulties of really knowing someone,even a spouse, when that person is very reticent to talk about their inner feelings and life-changing experiences. I don't know if growing up in an Irish Catholic family, as I did, helped in my appreciation of this book, but it certainly resonated for me. The main character, a judge, is dealing with memories about his relationship with his father, his father's debilitating stroke, the relationship with his wife and her stroke, and his two grown children and distance from them, especially involving the cases he rules on as a judge. It reads both like a first novel in describing the main character growing up so unsure of himself, without any of the indulgences of a first novel, and also as the work of an older writer dealing with the themes of loneliness and the finality of death. There are wonderful passages where relatives of the judge recall the early days of the Irish uprisings. The book has a modest and simple plan that is executed with precision.
—Richard Springer