The Story of the Night by Colm Toibin Review

This is a novel set in Argentina in the 1980s about a young gay man called Richard who is half Argentinian and half English.
Following the death of his father, Richard is brought up by his proudly English mother, and as he comes to adulthood he continues living with her in their low rent apartment, working at an undistinguished job at a language school. He lives a quiet, somewhat lonely life, satisfying his sexual urges with furtive, anonymous visits to saunas.

Although the "disappearances" - the secret arrests, torture and probable murders of political dissidents goes on around him, he claims, in retrospect, to have very little awareness of this and is later shamed when angrily challenged that he must have known about the disappearance of a girl he studied with. He seems to move through his world in a kind of fog, to be curiously disengaged. Ironically, it is when he is caught up in the patriotic fervour of Argentina's war with Britain that he feels truly and proudly Argentinian. That he is both of Argentina and yet something of an outsider, speaking perfect English, with an English accent is what draws the attention of an American diplomatic couple Susan and Donald who find work for him, when he finally walks out of the hated language school. Although his life takes on a new dimension, he still remains within his mother's fusty apartment, which he neglects to alter in any way, though he feels embarassed on the rare occasions he brings anyone back. The apartment seems to symbolise some kind of refusal to grow up, to fully live in the world.

Through the first two thirds of the book, we watch Richard floating on the edges of power, of the changes that are taking place in his country, partly through his agency. He remains fairly apolitical, though he is sickened when Susan confesses that she and her husband were in Chile, during the time of Pinochet's brutal repression and did nothing. Through Richard's eyes we gains some interesting impressions of Argentina during that period, though always from a certain distance.

In the last third of the book, the tone changes, becomes more focused and gripping, as Richard finally becomes emotionally engaged and is astonished to experience love, happiness and vulnerability. Harsh realities intrude but he does finally repaint his apartment and we get the sense he is finally, fully alive fully himself.

A delicate, subtle, sad and romantic book, whose meandering progress mimics the drifting quality of the hero's life and somehow draws you deep into the world of this elusive individual.