He noticed, as he flicked through the pages of his judgment, that the handwriting, especially when he wrote something quickly, had become exactly the same as his father's, a set of round squiggles, indecipherable to most others.
Through the story of a High Court judge, The Heather Blazing explores how we are all rooted to our pasts: the places and persons we once knew, and how we grow into them not just by acclimatising ourselves to them but by actually becoming them…
The judge treats the Constitution as his sacred text by middle age, and he has no firm convictions about morality which is, perhaps, as it should be. Although through all that he professes, it's impossible not to see his past — his upbringing — creep into his present, and to see that the patterns in his life keep repeating themselves.
Tóibín's novel, however, is at its most familiar and its most heartbreaking when it speaks of the weeks following the judge becoming a widower — how many of us have not wanted to rush back to someone we've known and loved to them them of something we've just seen only to realise that we no longer can?