SOURCE: Radin, Victoria. “The Secret Agent.” New Statesman 125, no. 4301 (20 September 1996): 48.

In the following review, Radin compliments the prose in The Story of the Night, but criticizes Tóibín for patronizing his readers while discussing the subject of AIDS.

Colm Toíbín is a writer's writer: fastidious, unshowy and capable of thrillingly accurate perceptions. His view of life is stoically tragic—an unfashionable stance in this age of grievances—and his range is wide. He can have as protagonist a young Irish woman who reinvents herself in the early years of Franco's Spain; Toíbín stays by her side, entirely plausibly, until her final years as a respected painter living on the bounty of the son she deserted. That was, astonishingly, Toíbín's first novel, The South.

In his second, The Heather Blazing, Toíbín anatomises an Irish judge whose harsh decisions may be...