Picador £12.99 pp310

“To remain calm, to stay hidden, to make the minimum number of moves possible” — those are the guiding principles observed by the thief in The Use of Reason, one of the short stories in Colm Toibin’s debut collection. They are also Toibin’s own. The fictional character has blown the legs off a barrister who prosecuted his brother: he steals a Rembrandt portrait and then, when he can’t safely sell it, burns the “sour old woman” with satisfaction. The writer who created him, I’m sure, has little in common with him. But when Toibin describes the criminal taking pleasure in a televised chess game (“he liked how slow and careful and calculating they were”), the words evoke his own authorial strategy. His last novel, The Master, was about Henry James, and, though Toibin’s prose (unlike James’s) is spare, his sentences short, his adverbs few and far between, it is evident that he believes, as James did, that human nature is complicated, and its depiction requires self-effacing detachment, intense consideration and caution.

A widow, considered by everyone in her small Irish town to have married above her, sets up a fish-and-chip shop to pay off the debts left by her supposedly superior husband and mother-in-law, only to find herself obliged to “muster every ounce of selfishness” to fend off her teenage son’s attempt to usurp the business she has created. An elderly woman singles out one of her grandsons, and his mother allows her to do so, thereby foisting her own filial duties onto the boy in a transaction in which generosity and exploitation are inextricably mixed. A self-possessed woman whose son, a priest, is accused of sexually abusing the children he has taught, is exasperated to find everybody around pouring their own shame and fear into an exaggerated concern for her feelings. In a pub in Clare, a young man, a folk-singer, sees the mother who abandoned him. She is a singer, too, and famous.

Unaware he’s there, she performs a ballad. He is tempted to harmonise. Toibin allows us a glimpse of that trite happy ending — only to withdraw it. These profoundly resonant stories, each one a version on the title’s theme, have a wide span. One describes a rave on a beach. Another is set in a remote village in Spain. But they all share a miraculous density. Short but weighty, they contain whole lives.

Toibin writes third-person narratives, but he stays close to his characters’ consciousness. The thief, contemplating a suburban townscape, sees opportunity; defenceless empty rooms and unwatched gardens into which a man could intrude with impunity. A woman, in America to arrange her sister’s funeral, drives through a similarly quiet neighbourhood and sees “an enclosed city of the dead, the houses like small tombs”. Miquel, in The Long Winter, the most ambitious and beautiful of these stories, hardly registers houses at all. A Pyrenean peasant farmer, he notices sky, weather, distance and the subtle gradations of emotion conveyed not by words but by actions which, however strenuous and drastic, are symbolic in intention. After the men of the village have trudged through thigh-deep snow for two days hunting for Miquel’s mother (whom they know must be dead), his father asserts they have done it only to humiliate him. It is probably true. This story, even more than the rest, seems like the visible part of a fictional world with immense unseen hinterlands. Every character, every relationship, is made up of the accretions of an undescribed but palpable past, something that makes them both vividly and solidly real to the reader, and as mysterious as other people always are.

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