Up to recently the tradition was that the budding writer served his or her apprenticeship writing short stories. Before venturing into the heady world of the novel, the initial exercise was to present your writing to the public in the form of a collection or two of the apparently easier, although technically much more demanding, genre. The list of our writers who have thus proceeded is long and full of eminent names. The Father of the Twentieth Century Novel, James Joyce, is there as is George Moore, Seán Ó Faoláin, James Plunkett, Bernard MacLaverty, and Colm McCann. Curiously, there are no women authors that jump to mind, except maybe Elizabeth Bowen.

Whether it is the manner in which the craft of writing is approached nowadays, or there has been a subtle shift in the perception of the different genres, there has been a noted change of emphasis in recent times in that established novelists having published a number of novels produce a collection of short stories. After four novels, the last of which was long listed for the Booker Prize, William Wall recently published a worthy collection of stories entitled No Paradiso and now one of our most eminent novelists Colm Tóibín presents us with his first collection Mothers and Sons.

Reading these collections is somewhat akin to watching somebody discard a favourite overcoat and trying on a brand new one. There is an initial creaking of parts, a slight discomfort with the wearer almost yearning for the more familiar garment. This expresses itself in curious ways. In some of the stories you feel as though the author is preparing for a novel on the same theme of the story, or the story progresses naturally to becoming a novella, as in the case of Tóibín's story A Long Winter, or there emerges what appear to be notes towards an autobiography as in Wall's The William Walls.

Eventually, however, the craft of writing takes over, the professional storyteller re-establishes himself. We find ourselves looking at the familiar writer in a new way and totally enjoying their new way of literary expression. From that point of view, there is something inherently refreshing about both these books.

In No Paradiso , Wall explores people who are on the edge either in terms of their own society, or their own humanity. In the story In Xanadu, we find ourselves back in the late sixties when the present drug culture in Ireland was in its infancy and the whole fabric of the established Irish society was beginning to fall apart. Following that there is the absorbing story The Bestiary in which a University Lecturer finds himself in a professional rut and lingers on the edge of insanity. The collection is an extraordinary example of the man living in the nineties dealing with the demons that haunted the sixties generation.

In almost total contrast, Tóibín's central theme explores the relationship that binds or divides the mothers of the older and the sons of the younger generations. There is a curious ambivalence evident in this relationship throughout the volume. In the first story of the collection the narrator, a professional criminal, obviously based on Martin Cahill, visits his mother ostensibly to warn her against saying too much about either himself or the family while drunk in public, but in actual fact to leave her some money. Yet as he leaves the house Tóibín writes:

"It was as though he had gone to his mother's house to be washed in the use of reason. As he walked away, he felt he was thinking clearly for the first time in months. He also, as he moved towards the city centre, had that lovely feeling that he had become oddly invisible. No one, he believed saw him or noticed him; no one would remember him. He was, he felt, at his more powerful".

This paragraph could be described as the book's epiphany. The more either mother or son expressed or enacted their own individuality or destiny, the more apart they appeared to be, the truer they were to themselves and each other. Time and again throughout the book, mother and son pull against each other only to find the bond between them all the stronger. It is the repetition of this theme in various different ways that is the unity and the strength of the book.

One of the great joys of life is to watch experts at work and honing their skills. Watching these two craftsmen take on a different genre and, within an unfamiliar discipline, demonstrate their ability and versatility in the way that Tóibín and Wall do in these two collections is one of the reasons why reading is one of the world's greatest and most satisfying pleasures.