Colm Tóibín, A Long Winter. Picador hb, 2025. First pub. in Mothers and Sons, 2005. 137pp. Library copy.
This is a little naughty, reissuing as a stand-alone hardback ‘novella’ what was originally a long short story in Tóibín’s collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, twenty years ago (as he acknowledges in an Afterword). The story itself runs to just 124 pp. in this small format hardback.
On one level this is a highly atmospheric tale of the mysterious disappearance one day at the start of the harsh winter in the high Catalonian Pyrenees of the mother of Miquel and his younger brother Jordi. She’d had an argument the previous day with their dour, domineering father, and had clearly just walked out.
But the burafa had set in – a kind of swirling, blizzard-like snow storm – and this makes searching for the missing woman nigh on impossible. Neighbours join in, but their help is grudging: Miquel’s father had been pretty much ostracised after his part in a dispute in which he’d shown his mean selfishness.
Much of the story is a tense account of Miquel’s increasingly frantic, futile attempts to negotiate the impassable, snowbound mountain roads and trails. As the neighbours grimly predict, his mother’s body probably won’t be found until the spring thaw – if she had in fact died in the storm.
There’s another, more subtle and poignant storyline. Miquel is gay, and there are a couple of scenes when he exchanges meaningful glances with a visiting police officer (they’d been called in to help with the search).
Then Manolo joins the household. He’s the orphaned young man who’d been housekeeping for a family over the mountain to merit his bed and board. Miquel and his father had always left all the cooking, cleaning and tending to the domestic animals, to their hard-pressed, long-suffering mother. Without her they struggle to survive, and Manolo’s arrival gets them out of a hole.
A bond grows between this young man and Miquel. This is subtly and movingly portrayed by Tóibín. This is a highly conservative, deeply Catholic community, so any kind of relationship between the two would be highly risky. This fine Irish author handles this complex web of secrets, lies and emotional tensions with great skill and delicacy.
