Colm Tóibín’s debut novel, The South (1990), was one of the first books I reviewed for a national newspaper. Set in Ireland and Spain in the 1930s, it is one of his finest works of fiction. The prose is spare and has a kind of stillness in it. He has since written about emigration to America in the 1950s, Argentina at the time of the junta, Henry James and sexuality. I have taken all these subjects in my stride. Now he has written about Mary, the mother of Jesus, with whose story I am, frankly, unfamiliar in all but the broadest detail.
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