In Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, the opening few sentences of the book are repeated at the start of the final third. The novel opens as follows:
Eamon Redmond stood at the window looking down at the river which was deep brown after days of rain. He watched the colour, the mixture of mud and water, and the small currents and pockets of movement within the flow. It was a Friday morning at the end of July; the traffic was heavy on the quays. Later, when the court had finished its sitting he would come back again and look out once more at the watery grey light over the houses across the river and wait for the stillness, when the cars and lorries had disappeared and Dublin was quiet.
The novel follows Redmond, a judge, over the course of three summers, beginning with the end of the court session and the start of his summer vacation. Much changes in Redmond’s life over these years, and we hear, also, about his childhood and his early adult years. The third, and final section, starts in a similar fashion:
Eamon Redmond stood at the window looking down at the river which was deep brown after days of rain. He watched the colour, the mixture of muds and water, and the small currents and pockets of movement within the flow. It was the last day of term; later, he was due to sit in the Special Criminal Court. He brought a chair over to the window so that he could read the morning newspaper by clear daylight. He listened through the open window to the sound of gulls over the hum of traffic, and looked out again at the muddy water.
The first two sentences are identical, save the odd difference of “mud” in the first and “muds” in the second. (I have wondered if this is, in fact, a typo and not a deliberate choice.) The ends of the paragraphs are different and yet connected. There is a marker of time; there is traffic; there is the watching and listening from the window. In the first chapter, the paragraph moves through time, from the beginning of the day to the end; in the second case, everything happens as the day begins. Because of the use of the conditional to move forward in time, the verb tense shifts to present tense and then back to past tense, while in the second case we stay locked in the moment and in past tense. There is repetition in some of the phrases as well: “look out once more” is clearly linked to “looked out again.”
I was thrilled when I discovered this on a repeat reading of the novel. It underscores what is happening with the character, a man who resists change even as change is happening everywhere around him. And yet the second part of the second paragraph, while having some repetition, is altered slightly. Even if it is small, a shift has occurred. An incremental change, and it seems as though Tóibín is using both the repetition and the change to indicate that more change is to come.
Over the past year or so, I have been working on a new project, which features three women who live in different moments in the 20th century. They are connected: the central character is a maid to one woman and the mother of another. When one woman’s brother dies, I found myself writing the following sentence: “How would she and Julia navigate the space before them without Fred?” Something felt vaguely familiar to me with that sentence, and I searched my document for “navigate the space.” And there it was: “She felt despair tighten in her chest: how would she and Peter manage to navigate the space before them without John?” Another character, another death, another questioning of how to move forward when three become two.
I began to delete the new sentence, and then I remembered Tóibín’s example. Why couldn’t I leave it? And, in fact, why couldn’t I make it exactly the same? So I changed the new sentence to: “She felt despair tighten in her chest: how would she and Julia manage to navigate the space before them without Fred?” I like how it connects the two characters as they go through a similar situation, quietly underlining the way in which these very different women experience the same thought in a similar fashion.
After that, I started doing this deliberately. Part of the work of the project, I think, is to show the ways in which these women are similar and yet different. The juxtaposition of their individual stories allows that to happen organically. But it has also been fun to play with this idea, to think about the best way to show this on the sentence level.
Here’s an example of how a sentence is repeated and echoed for all three characters:
She smiled and curtseyed, then was immediately embarrassed. Where had that come from?
This character is a woman of wealth and privilege in the early 20th century. Perhaps as a child she might have curtseyed, but certainly not as an adult, and she can’t quite understand why she curtseyed in this moment, as she is meeting a man to whom she is attracted. A built-in patriarchal subservience, perhaps.
Several chapters on, we’re with a different character, a teenager in the mid-20th century:
She smiled as she stumbled over her words, as she said her grandmother’s first name; she fought an innate urge to curtsey. Where did that come from?
This character doesn’t actually curtsey, but pushes back against an urge to do so. She can’t quite understand why she would have even thought of it. In her case, she wouldn’t have curtseyed as a child. But she is talking to her grandmother’s long-term employer and is feeling the power differential between them. I like the idea of linking their interior thoughts in this way as it shows the pressure of the private as well as the public patriarchy, and it also shows how things change over time.
And then, the third character, a maid in the early 20th century, meets her employer upon his return:
Elsa nodded her head at him and curtseyed, her eyes fixed to the ground.
This character would automatically curtsey and would never question doing so. So the action is repeated here, but not the interiority, not the questioning. It is the absence of the reflection that is meaningful in this iteration.
This attention to repetition has been a wonderful thing to play with as I write, a way to allow me to focus on my sentences, and also see how the sentences can shadow each other and carry some of the thematic weight. I’m looking forward to revising and editing this project, continuing to find ways to use repetition, to show both similarities and differences. Can you think of ways to use repetition and echoes in your work?
See you in two weeks!
Love the idea of single sentences carrying the weight of a theme throughout a novel. Makes me wonder if I've missed this in other works.
Omg, love this! Really love this, particularly your character-specific relationships to the curtsey.
Unrelated to your craft essay but worth some joy is that, I learned last week, Toibin has written a sequel to Brooklyn. It’s coming out in 2024.
Laura, I don’t recall your mentioning Alice McDermott as one of your go-to authors, but I think of her as one of the great American writers who explores the interiority of so-called ordinary women.
Thank you for this post! Robyn