You catch yourself thinking, well, we could always put it off to another time – it’s not as if we’re going anywhere. That moment of wanting gets more . . . fragile, I think. You’re watching a TV programme, half thinking about going to bed, then you change channels, watch some rubbish and within twenty minutes you’re both yawning and the moment’s gone. Or one of you wants to read and the other one doesn’t and he/she lies there in the half-dark waiting for the light to be put out, and then the waiting, the hope, turns to mild resentment, and the moment goes, and that’s it. Or, a few days go past – more than usual, anyway – and you find that time works both ways simultaneously. On the one hand you miss sex and on the other you begin to forget about it. When we were kids we used to think that monks and nuns must be secretly randy all the time. Now I think: I bet they don’t worry about it at all, most of them, I bet it just goes away.

Don’t get me wrong. I like sex; so does Oliver. And I still like sex with Oliver. He knows what I like and what I want. Orgasm is not a problem. We know the best way to get there, for both of us. You could say that was almost part of the problem. If there is one. I mean, we almost always make love in the same way – same amount of time, same length of (horrid word) foreplay, same position, or positions. And we do it like that because that’s what works best – that’s what experience has told us we like best. So it becomes a tyranny, or obligation, or something. In any case, impossible to get out of. The rule about married sex, if you’re interested – and you may not be -is that after a few years you aren’t allowed to do anything you haven’t done before. Yes, I know, I’ve read all those article and advice columns about how to spice up your sex life, about getting him to buy you special underwear, and sometimes just having a romantic candlelit dinner for two, and setting aside quality time to be together, and I just laugh because life isn’t like that. My life, anyway. Quality time? There’s always another load of washing.

Our sex life is . . . friendly. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I can see that you do. Perhaps all too well. We’re partners in the act. We enjoy one another’s company in the act. We do our best for one another, we look after one another in the act. Our sex life is . . . friendly. I’m sure there are worse things. Much worse.

Have I put you off? He or she beside you has had their light out for some time now. They’re doing that breathing which is meant to sound like sleep but doesn’t really. You probably said, “I’ll just finish this bit,” and got a friendly grunt in reply, but then you read on a bit longer than you thought. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Because I’ve put you off. You don’t feel like sex any more. Do you?

In a previous novel (Talking It Over, 1991), Gillian and Stuart were married. Feckless Oliver was Stuart’s best friend and he seduced Gillian and stole her away.

Now they are ten years older, and only a little wiser. Stuart has become a businessman and regards himself as a success. Pretentious Oliver has fallen on hard times and seems unable to get his life together. And Gillian, the sensible but pedestrian one, is still in the middle.

Each character, in turn, tries to seduce us with a personal version of the truth. But in the end we are left with the suspicion that there is no truth, that the truth does not exist as an objective entity. I was left with the same feeling I get from exposure to a Beckett script; that we wait for something that happens or doesn’t happen and then we die. We don’t connect, not really.

Having said that, one should not under estimate Julian Barnes’ wry humour. He has the capacity to hear and communicate the despair which underlays laughter and is always ready to give the nod of recognition to our absurdities.

Intelligent and moving, this is a book to seek out.

Loneliness is a condition that many of Trevor’s characters endure and he is a master at finding the right rhythms and tones to portray their inner lives. This is true of his novels, but probably more so of his many short stories.

The Potato Dealer, one of the excellent stories here, opens like this:

Mulreavy would marry her if they paid him, Ellie’s uncle said: she couldn’t bring a fatherless child into the world. He didn’t care what was done nowadays; he didn’t care what the fashion was; he wouldn’t tolerate the talk there’d be. ‘Mulreavy,’ her uncle repeated. ‘D’you know who I mean by Mulreavy?’

She hardly did. An image came into her mind of a big face that had a squareness about it, and black hair, and a cigarette butt adhering to the lower lip while a slow voice agreed or disagreed and eyes that were small and sharp as splinters. Mulreavy was a potato dealer. Once a year he came to the farm, his old lorry rattling into the yard, then backed up to where the sacks stood ready for him. Sometimes he shook his head when he examined the potatoes, saying they were too small. He tried that on, Ellie’s uncle maintained. Cagey, her uncle said.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, girl,’ her uncle said when she found the strength to protest at what was being proposed. ‘I’ll tell you this: you can’t stay here without there’s something along lines like I’m saying. Nowadays is nothing, girl. There’s still the talk.’

He was known locally as Mr Larrissey, rarely by his Christian name, which was Joseph. Ellie didn’t call him ‘Uncle Joseph’, never had; ‘uncle’ sometimes, though not often, for even in that there seemed to be an intimacy that did not belong in their relationship. She thought of him as Mr Larrissey.

‘It’s one thing or the other, girl.’

Her mother – her uncle’s sister – didn’t say anything. Her mother hadn’t opened her mouth on the subject of Mulreay, but Ellie knew that she shared the sentiments that were being expressed, and would accept, in time, the solution that had been offered. She had let her mother down; she had embittered her; why should her mother care what happened now? All of it was a mess. In the kitchen of the farmhouse her mother and her uncle were thinking the same thing.

Her uncle – a worn, tired man, not used to trouble like this – didn’t forgive here and never would: so he had said, and Ellie knew it was true. Since the death of her father she and her mother had lived with him on the farm on sufferance: that was always in his eyes, even though her mother did all the cooking and the cleaning of the house, even though Ellie, since she was eleven, had helped in summer in the fields, had collected and washed the eggs and nourished the pigs. Her uncle had never married; and if she and her mother hadn’t moved on to the farm in 1978, when Ellie was five, he’d still be on his own, managing as best he could.

‘You have the choice, girl,’ he said now, repetition heavy in the farmhouse kitchen. He was set in his ways, Ellie’s mother often said; lifelong bachelors sometimes were.

In other stories a childless wife is devastated after discovering her husband’s long-term affair; parents of an adult daughter are undermined after the return of a rakish friend who their daughter promised she would marry as a child. And politics are also given an airing in the form of Ireland’s troubles: in Lost Ground, the longest piece here, we witness a young protestant boy’s death after his family fail to come to terms with his vision of a catholic saint.

Trevor has often been compared with Chekhov, but there is actually little evidence for this apart from the fact that both wrote short stories and both were masterful craftsmen and wordsmiths. Chekhov abandoned plot and fashioned the narratives of his stories like life: meaningless, random, inconclusive, often cruel. He refuses to judge or explain, he won’t celebrate or attribute meaning. He is only interested in depicting his experience of life.

Trevor’s world is different. Invariably something happens to dislodge an uneasy and tendentious equilibrium. There follows some kind of collapse. His characters become melancholy, often damaged. But as the stories come to their conclusion, Trevor’s intelligence and heart are close to hand. We are led to an emotional plateau in which something vital, through the events depicted, has changed irrevocably.

Toibin is the master of understatement and he has the ability to write youth with all the elegance of a Scott-Fitzgerald.

In the following passage Eilis spends Christmas helping out with the homeless:

After a while Eilis noticed that two men had taken out fiddles and another a small accordion; they had found a corner and were playing as a few others stood around and listened. Father Flood was moving about the hall with a notebook now, writing down names and addresses and nodding as old men spoke to him. After a while he clapped his hands and called for silence but it took a few minutes before he could get everyone’s attention.

‘I don’t want to interrupt the proceedings,’ he said, ‘but we’d like to thank a nice girl from Enniscorthy and two nice women from Arklow for their hard day’s work.’

There was a round of applause.

‘And, as a way of thanking them, there’s one great singer in this hall and we’re delighted to see him this year again.’

He pointed to the man whom Eilis had mistaken for her father. He was sitting away from Eilis and Father Flood, but he stood up when his name was called and walked quietly towards them. He stood with his back to the wall so that everyone could see him.

‘That man,’ Miss Murphy whispered to Eilis, ‘has made LPs.’

When Eilis looked up the man was signaling to her. He wanted her, it seemed, to come and stand with him. It struck her for a second that he might want her to sing so she shook her head, but he kept beckoning and people began to turn and look at her; she felt that she had no choice but to leave her seat and approach him. She could not think why he wanted her. As she came closer she saw how bad his teeth were.

He did not greet her or acknowledge her arrival but closed his eyes and reached his hand towards hers and held it. The skin on the palm of his hand was soft. He gripped her hand tightly and began to move it in a faint circular motion as he started to sing. His voice was loud and strong and nasal; the Irish he sang in, she thought, must be Connemara Irish because she remembered one teacher from Galway in the Mercy Convent who had that accent. He pronounced each word carefully and slowly, building up a wildness, a ferocity, in the way he treated the melody. It was only when he came to the chorus, however, that she understood the words – ‘Ma bhionn tu liom, a stoirin mo chroi’ – and he glanced at her proudly, almost possessively, as he sang these lines. All the people in the hall watched him silently. There were five or six verses; he sang the words out with pure innocence and charm so that at times, when he closed his eyes, leaning his large frame against the wall, he did not seem like an old man at all; the strength of his voice and the confidence of his performance had taken over. And then each time he came to the chorus he looked at her, letting the melody become sweeter by slowing down the pace, putting his head down then, managing to suggest even more that he had not merely learned the song but that he meant it. Eilis knew how sorry this man was going to be, and how sorry she would be, when the song had ended, when the last chorus had to be sung and the singer would have to bow to the crowd and go back to his place and give way to another singer as Eilis too went back and sat in her chair.

Slow, thoughtful, but interlaced with some lovely comic moments, Brooklyn is a real treat. This is Colm Toibin at the height of his powers, and is not to be missed.

The musicians in the market behind me are playing tango and the young Montevideanos are embracing and singing and dancing, still ruminating on the glories of the night. The older generation are shopping; they pass time with the store holders, watching surreptitiously in case the unthinkable occurs.

When I turn the corner the volume is muted and for a moment I am alone. But from the far end of the street a wedding party struts towards me. The bride and groom lead with their hips, two maids of honour, sisters, in pale makeup and strappy dresses, followed by friends with half finished bottles of sangria dangling from fingertips, the women in flowery dresses, their men in tightly tailored suits, kissing as they walk, children weaving in and out of the legs of their parents and relations. The remains of song on their lips. Tears. Tired smiles. Verse, rhythm, ever reluctant to leave.

I tuck myself against the wall of a house and watch them pass. The bride has dark eyes and dark hair which flash and shimmer in the light of the sun and she takes huge strides on legs hidden beneath the skirts of her dress. Her new husband is a drone. She is a rainbow, borne by beauty. The world worships her. She will know happiness all her days. It rushes headlong towards her.

‘Come with us,’ a mawkish mother calls. She gestures towards the market. ‘Breakfast at the Parrillada.’ I give her my best face. They are early for lunch but someone will provide ribs or sausage or milanesas.

The smile is pinned to my face as they go. I am paralysed by their happiness; their inability to perceive tragedy or loneliness or to imagine spiritual isolation has allowed me to forget my own poverty. Momentarily it seems we are together, inextricably stamped into each other’s lives. Perhaps no one ever dies alone?

I am brought back to the street when the wedding party has left, and my smile and my loneliness are rediscovered, their backs against the wall. Over the road a curtain moves and a gnarled hand and arm behind the glass are trapped for an instant by the rays of the sun. I can’t make out if there is a face behind the arm or if I imagine it, a gaze from a hollow-eyed skull, a being of darkness, of silence and grief.

Poets notice these things, these moments, and it is our task to use them as a launch-pad for the imagination. This is our curse and our blessing. This street is ordinary and ancient. It is within sound of the market and the Cathedral. Nothing distinguishes it and it is studded with adequate symbols.

A woman opens her door and peers out; she has heard the wedding party but is too late. She has missed the plot; the narrative has gone ahead of her. She looks one way and the other before retreating back inside, condemned to a life within her cardigan.

I hobble on. The sole of my left trainer has worn through and that part of my foot near the big toe – the first metatarsus? – contacts the pavement simultaneously with what remains of the shoe. In sympathy with this plight the skin around the area has hardened into something similar to shoe leather. I am handicapped by this calamity, more so when it rains. But I don’t let it get me down as it also comes with the territory of being a poet. It is a badge.

Back at my room in the conventillo I sit in silence. The silence is a composition of small sounds; the far-off wailing of a child, the shuffling of a mouse in the cavity between my room and the top of the stairs, the spluttering of a moped in the street. Along the landing behind the door with the polished wood handle a protesting babe is born into a corporate world.

My table has a white formica top, it’s surface scarred with razor slashes like the forearms of anxiety and emotional turmoil. Long ago my father, who never listened, had a similar table in his garden shed. A place for his seedlings. My chair has one loose leg. If I forget and lift the chair the leg falls off. But it works like a normal chair if I sit on it. We have a relationship, me and the chair. It is the first meaningful relationship I have had with furniture. I am drawn to the lower orders. Unlike husbands and wives, we have no nerve wars.

The light fades and I push the switch on the lamp. I open my pad at a clean page and lift my pen. I expect to write. I am infused with hope.

But nothing comes. Each turn in my imagination leads to another banality. I check the window and see the crippled girl in the street. The single crutch. The white face opening like petals as she glances up at my room. I rush down the stairs. But she is gone by the time I get there. Impossibly gone.

I feel I might, one day, be meaningful in her life. She herself both loves and fears the idea. Part of her wishes for someone with a car; a man who would drive her out to Aguas Dulces or Costa Azul, ply her with sweet wine and discuss holidays or interior design. Not me. I would bring her something less defined, colder perhaps but more substantial, a world wholly tangled. I must pursue her with more passion, more avidity. I would hate the knowledge that I let her slip away through inertia.

As I wonder how she has escaped me, a huge, full, silver, and unpredictable moon sails over the rooftops into the street. Everyone is gazing skyward. There should be music, brass or strings..

Back upstairs in the crumbling conventillo I slump in front of the pad, clutch my pen and stare into the space between me and the page. The poem I want to write tells how you can travel round the world, set up home in Montevideo and find you’re almost exactly the same guy who started out from Tiger Bay eighteen months earlier. You’re only different inasmuch as the expectations of those around you have shifted; and the language in some way distorts your natural posture. You are marginally freed while being just as securely chained.

I reach for a starting point, a first line, a word. But it is like praying to God; only silence is returned. I lean further into the stillness, loosening all that tethers me, living on faith. I shrivel my world into two: death or glory.

After time has shifted oceans and mountains; after the perfectibility of man has been achieved and forgotten; and when a leg has been healed and happiness unmasked, there is a movement, a scuttling in the dark corner behind me and I am primed. I wait for the pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing to knock on the door of my mind, to take me wheeling through the enormous void of the stars. I wait to trap and craft a visiting verse.

‘I have not analysed myself in any other way than by creating in my books hundreds of characters – each one spun out of myself – with the advantages and disadvantages of all imaginary persons. The so-called naturalistic period, Emile Zola and his contemporaries, wrote about people with so-called main characteristics. They had no use for the nuances of psychology, their persons had a ‘dominating quality which determined their character. Dostoevsky and others taught us something else about human beings. From my earliest writings I don’t think there exists in my entire production any person with such a straight dominating quality. They are all without so-called ‘character’, they are split and divided, they are not good or bad but both. They consist of many parts, there are nuances, they change in mind and actions.
‘And that is the way I am myself, without a doubt. It is quite possible that I am aggressive. I may have some of the characteristics hinted at by the professor – vulnerable, suspicious, egotistical, generous, jealous, judicious, sensitive, cold – all these qualities would be human. But I don’t know that I could give any of them supremacy in my nature. Whatever I consist of, whatever I am, came to me as a gift of grace which has made it possible for me to write my books. It is a gift I cannot analyse, Georg Brandes called it the divine folly.’

It is more than thirty years since I first read Knut Hamsun’s Pan. I had few memories of it, though I remembered the language, the poetry, and the mystery surrounding Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, the central character.

Glahn is a Pan-like man. He has rented a shack up in the woods in the far north of Norway where he lives by hunting and fishing. He has a dog, but otherwise lives alone, communing with trees and the sea, telling the time of day by the sun and bird-song, feeling the closeness of God around him. The opening pages show us Glahn’s absolute association of nature with divinity and there is an expectation of the tale becoming a kind of pastoral romance.

Hamsun said, “My new book will be beautiful; it takes place in Nordland, a quiet and red love story. There will be no polemics in it, just people under different skies.”

Into Glahn’s world, and attracted by his charisma and his ‘animal look’, come two women; the passionate teenager, Edvarda, who is stimulated almost entirely by the chase; and simple, tragic Eva, the wife of the local blacksmith.

Hamsun gives us a kind of Pan, a character who is half man, half goat; someone who can easily live alone and survive in nature, but who is completely incapable of life in the social realm. The novel is accomplished, astoundingly, by the subtle use of lyrical language and attention to what Hamsun described as the life of the mind.

This second visit to Hamsun’s novel showed me a picture of masculinity that I had not identified in my first reading. And although it may well contain elements of truth, the picture is a disturbing one and has left me with more questions than conclusions.

Nevertheless, Pan is a great novel, beautifully written and executed, and worth the time of anyone who appreciates good literature.

‘Hamsun has the qualities that belong to the very great, the completest omniscience about human nature.’ Rebecca West.

I believe I can read something of the minds of those about me; perhaps it is not so. Oh, on my good days I feel as though I can gaze deep into the minds of others, even though I am not particularly clever in other ways. We sit in a room, a few men, a few women and I, and I seem to see what goes on within these people and what they think of me. I read something into every fleeting glance of their eyes; at times the blood rises to their cheeks and they flush, at other times they pretend to be looking elsewhere, but they observe me out of the corners of their eyes. There I sit watching it all, and nobody suspects that I see through every mind. For many years I have supposed that I could read in the minds of everyone I met. Perhaps it is not so. . . .

I returned, however, with unabated vigour to my work – a more arduous task than anyone can imagine, who has not felt something like the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty; while at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior’s more potent authority: which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give.

I read the passage again, and then again, before putting the book to one side and beginning to look for another.

”How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?”

JM Coetzee’s honest, compelling and brave novel reminded me of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, and it reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The writing has the same kind of quality of these other novels, in that it takes a simple story about a simple man and elevates it by way of language into a terrifying masterpiece. Huckleberry Finn is in there, too, of course, watching the river flow.

This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator. On a shelf in the shed he had found a packet of pumpkin seeds, some of which he had already idly roasted and eaten; he still had the mealie kernels; and on the pantry floor he had even picked up a solitary bean. In the space of a week he cleared the land near the dam and restored the system of furrows that irrigated it. Then he planted a small patch of pumpkins and a small patch of mealies; and some distance away on the river bank, where he would have to carry water to it, he planted his bean, so that if it grew it could climb into the thorntrees.

For the most part he was living on birds that he killed with his catapult. His days were divided between this form of hunting, which he carried on nearer the farmhouse, and the tilling of the soil. His deepest pleasure came at sunset when he turned open the cock at the dam wall and watched the stream of water run down its channels to soak the earth, turning it from fawn to deep brown. It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature. He sharpened the blade of his spade on a stone, the better to savour the instant when it clove the earth. The impulse to plant had been reawoken in him; now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he had planted there.

There were times, particularly in the mornings, when a fit of exultation would pass through him at the thought that he, alone and unknown, was making this deserted farm bloom But following on the exultation would sometimes come a sense of pain that was obscurely connected with the future; and then it was only brisk work that could keep him from lapsing into gloominess.

The borehole, pumped dry, yielded only a weak and intermittent stream. It became K’s deepest wish for the flow of water from the earth to be restored. He pumped only as much as his garden needed, allowing the level in the dam to drop to a few inches and watching without emotion as the marsh dried up, the mud caked, the grass withered, the frogs turned on their backs and died. He did not know how underground waters replenished themselves but knew it was bad to be prodigal. He could not imagine what lay beneath his feet, a lake of a running stream or a vast inner sea or a pool so deep it had no bottom. Every time he released the brake and the wheel spun and water came, it seemed to him a miracle; he hung over the dam wall, closed his eyes, and held his fingers in the stream.

He lived by the rising and setting of the sun, in a pocket outside time. Cape Town and the war and his passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness.

When the novel opens Michael K is thirty-one years old and living with his mother. His is the story of an innocent who wants to be left alone a survivor in a world gone bad. Coetzee describes a social and political environment which can never be redeemed. Our only hope is to abandon it.

Michael K is treated as a criminal by the State, in fact by almost everyone he meets. He has a hare lip and is regarded as slow. As an infant he is not nourished at his mother’s breast, he is interned in a special school for simpletons, later he gets to know prison camps, he is hunted and harassed by the police, the army, and passing thugs. He learns to starve. His crime was being born.

This morning without notice, a convoy of trucks arrived bringing four hundred new prisoners, the batch held up first at Reddersburg for a week and then on the line north of Beaufort West. All the time we were playing games here, and spending time with girlfriends, and philosophizing about life and death and history, these men waited in cattle trucks parked in sidings under the November sun, sleeping packed against one another in the cold of the highland nights, let out twice a day to relieve themselves, eating nothing but porridge cooked over thornbush fires beside the tracks, watching cargoes more urgent than themselves rumble past while the spider spun his web between the wheels of their home.

This is not a happy or easy novel, but a rewarding one, and certainly worth spending time with.