Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

It has been said of the Irish author, Colm Tóibín that his writing is marked by "austere, monkish prose". There's more to the man than that, though, as readers of his most recent triumph, The Master, have learned. In the book, Tóibín's adopting the register of Henry James is completely convincing and further proof of his extraordinary talent.

In this weekend's edition of the New York Times, Colm Tóibín reviews LOVE, POVERTY, AND WAR: Journeys and Essays by Christopher Hitchens. In these two paragraphs he praises and pans:

In Hitchens's assaults on Mother Teresa, it was apparent that the storm had merely found its teacup; then, after 9/11, he found a worthy subject. His message was clear. These atrocities were not caused by 'freedom fighters'; these events were not chickens come home to roost. 'The bombers of Manhattan,' he writes, 'represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it.' He now had two new sets of archenemies, the bombers themselves and those in the United States who took the view that the atrocities were a result of American foreign policy. In the months after 9/11, Hitchens ran a campaign of shock and awe against these people, most of it passionate and, even in retrospect, persuasive.

HE then wrote two articles, included at the end of this book, that represent a low point in his long career. In October 2001, when he visited Pakistan, all his subtlety and street wisdom left him, all his wit was gone. He was simply an arrogant Englishman in a hot country having a snarl at the natives. Watching the local men coming out of the mosques, Hitchens became indignant at them for displaying what he could 'only call an attitude.' He himself has made his living, and rightly so, out of such displays. 'As elsewhere in Pakistan,' he says, 'there was a miasma of self-pity mingled with self-righteousness.' Some of that miasma must have been infectious, since Hitchens exudes his own brand of self-righteousness and vast superiority in his account of his journeys through the country at that time. Evelyn Waugh would have recognized his type."

On the day after he finished his final exams in September 1975, Colm Tóibín left Dublin for Barcelona where he got a job teaching English at an institution called the Dublin School of English. His career evolved from English teaching to journalism to fiction writing: "Magazine journalism gives you all the tricks of fiction. Endings, openings, stopping, starting. You deal with story and you are absolutely reader-shaped," he once said. His website, by the way, is exquisite.