SOURCE: Scurr, Ruth. “In the Kitchen at Dusk.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5033 (17 September 1999): 21.

In the following review, Scurr praises Tóibín's control of the narrative in The Blackwater Lightship.

Five years before the publication of his first novel, The South (1990), Colm Tóibín interviewed the writer John McGahern for the magazine In Dublin. Passion tempered by precision, the hallmark of Tóibín's journalism and later his fiction, was manifest on this occasion in a remarkable report of a conversation about books.

He [McGahern] agrees that there is no tradition of the novel in Ireland, and no fixed settled society from which the novelist can feed; no sharp world of manners and morals. He agrees that maybe this is where the peculiar desolation in his work comes from, that this is what saddens his work.

When he could get a word in, McGahern agreed, but the...