If you’re having lunch with the Booker-shortlisted novelist, expect a wide-ranging discussion
If you were to go in search of a prime example of the genus “writer”, Colm Toíbín would have strong claims as exhibit A. There’s the face to begin with: meaty, heavy browed, quick-eyed, both grave and wickedly animated, the head and neck invariably rising, as today, out of a white shirt and a black coat. And then the voice, with the inflection of his native Co Wexford, low tones moving easily to lightness, erudite and conspiratorial. Seeing Toíbín advancing toward you across the restaurant is the equivalent of hearing a memorable opening line: “Call me Ishmael”, or – his own favourite this (from Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers) – “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me.” You sense that Toíbín comes complete with stories.
In vague homage to his early writing career in Catalonia we are at the Marylebone outpost of the tapas chain Iberica (which actually has its roots in the northern Spanish province of Asturias, where owner Nacho Manzano developed his two-star Michelin soul food up in the mountains). Toíbín has been doing an interview with the BBC up the road about the sex life of Henry James and he’s had no breakfast – “I just lay in the hotel bed brooding as ever” – so he’s starving. Having established the provenance of the Asturian waitress, with whom he falls into fluent conversation about the Spanish distinction between talking “Christian” rather than “Catalan”, he offers a potted history of the weakness of the separatist movement. “Catalan is spoken also on the islands and in Valencia. But they hate Barcelona. Menorca went communist in the time of the civil war. Mallorca went fascist and those tendencies persist as though there was something in the blood or in the soil – while Ibiza just has fun and enjoys life…” As he recounts this history we pick some staple highlights from the menu: patatas bravas, padrón peppers, twice-cooked lamb, jamón ibérico from Manzano’s acorn-fed pigs, and settle back while the plates fill the table.
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I still go back to Barcelona every year, but I go to the mountains – there is not so much to excite me in the city
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