BrooklynBy Colm Tóibín (Viking £17.99)
Colm Tóibín's remarkable novel, which has beaten Booker prizewinner Hillary Mantel to win the Costa Novel Award, is a story of love and emigration set in 1950s Ireland and America. The history it charts is in many ways a simple one; in outline, it almost seems banal. As the book opens, Eilis, unemployed, unmarried and in her twenties, is living in Enniscorthy with her mother and older sister, her father having died some years earlier and her three brothers having moved to England. When an opportunity arises for her to take a job in a Brooklyn department store, she reluctantly agrees to leave her homeland.
Eilis travels to America by steam ship and moves into a boarding house. Although painfully lonely at first, she gradually pieces a life together; one that offers, if not real happiness, then at least the promise of it. She befriends some of her fellow lodgers and attends bookkeeping classes in the evening. She takes pleasure in American clothes and in having, for the first time in her life, some money of her own. At a dance she meets Tony, an Italian-American plumber, and becomes his girlfriend. Soon marriage beckons. But then a family tragedy forces Eilis back to Ireland for a few weeks, and there she discovers that the life she has made for herself in America is not the one she wants. But it is too late. Circumstances mean that she must return to Brooklyn, and life with Tony.
What makes this ordinary-seeming Irish immigrant tale so absorbing is the quality of attention that Tóibín brings to its telling. Critics sometimes say that writers "inhabit" a character, and usually the word suggests a degree of intimacy that is unrealistic. But with Brooklyn it feels apt: Tóibín does take us behind the scenes of Ellis's life, so that we are privy to her thoughts and feelings, the rhythm and texture of her days. The sense that Brooklyn produces is above all one of recognition: this is actually what a life is like.
Naturally, this places limits on what, linguistically, he can attempt. When Eilis ventures into Manhattan for the first time, and we read that "She could see no difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan… except that the cold from the subway seemed more severe and dry and the wind more fierce," it is hard not to feel that Tóibín is short-selling the city's attractions. But his judgement—and who are we to disagree?—is that Manhattan's skyscrapers would have made no impression on a young woman from provincial Ireland. What Eilis herself doesn't see or think, Tóibín makes no attempt to describe.
Some of the most powerful passages in the book address themselves to Eilis's mental anguish, the product initially of her homesickness and later of her increasingly troubled love life. The fact that Eilis is an immigrant means, of course, that she is poised between two worlds, and Tóibín brilliantly evokes the oddly unstable quality that memory has in such situations; the way a person's most basic feelings about the past can suddenly change. A few weeks after arriving in Brooklyn, Eilis receives her first letters from home and is thrown into despair. "That night," Tóibín writes, "was the worst she had ever spent." But a day or two later, Eilis pulls herself together, and soon the world of Enniscorthy recedes; Brooklyn comes to occupy the foreground. Later, though, when she returns to Ireland, her sense of belonging in America proves, in turn, to be illusory, and within a couple of weeks she comes to feel that it was all a "dream from which she had awoken with considerable force." These shifts feel entirely life-like, true to the fluctuations that accompany any geographical wrench.
The period Brooklyn is set in was, of course, one in which difficult emotions weren't often acknowledged. This makes the novel's focus on Eilis's inner life striking. What Tóibín is doing is in a sense anachronistic: he is bringing a contemporary sensibility, one versed in the language of inner "conflict," to bear on a world for which such concepts had little meaning. But Tóibín handles this collision with great delicacy—and this delicacy is largely the product of his language. Although his focus on Eilis's inner life belongs to a world removed from that of the novel, the language he uses—simple and declarative—grounds his narrative in the era in which it is set.
In this respect, Tóibín's approach differs markedly from that of Ian McEwan in On Chesil Beach, another recent (and much praised) historical novel set during roughly the same period. McEwan's novel has a didactic quality: it is full of ironical observations about how life before the sexual revolution differed from today. The result is to create a clear sense of division between then and now, and McEwan's approach, intentionally or not, feels condescending: the past is a problem that social progress has helped overcome. But Tóibín's novel offers no such lessons, and is far more satisfying as a result. Brooklyn is a work of historical fiction in which "history" hardly seems the point. Its targets are the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart.
This article first appeared in the May 2009 edition of Prospect
Colm Tóibín's remarkable novel, which has beaten Booker prizewinner Hillary Mantel to win the Costa Novel Award, is a story of love and emigration set in 1950s Ireland and America. The history it charts is in many ways a simple one; in outline, it almost seems banal. As the book opens, Eilis, unemployed, unmarried and in her twenties, is living in Enniscorthy with her mother and older sister, her father having died some years earlier and her three brothers having moved to England. When an opportunity arises for her to take a job in a Brooklyn department store, she reluctantly agrees to leave her homeland.
Eilis travels to America by steam ship and moves into a boarding house. Although painfully lonely at first, she gradually pieces a life together; one that offers, if not real happiness, then at least the promise of it. She befriends some of her fellow lodgers and attends bookkeeping classes in the evening. She takes pleasure in American clothes and in having, for the first time in her life, some money of her own. At a dance she meets Tony, an Italian-American plumber, and becomes his girlfriend. Soon marriage beckons. But then a family tragedy forces Eilis back to Ireland for a few weeks, and there she discovers that the life she has made for herself in America is not the one she wants. But it is too late. Circumstances mean that she must return to Brooklyn, and life with Tony.
What makes this ordinary-seeming Irish immigrant tale so absorbing is the quality of attention that Tóibín brings to its telling. Critics sometimes say that writers "inhabit" a character, and usually the word suggests a degree of intimacy that is unrealistic. But with Brooklyn it feels apt: Tóibín does take us behind the scenes of Ellis's life, so that we are privy to her thoughts and feelings, the rhythm and texture of her days. The sense that Brooklyn produces is above all one of recognition: this is actually what a life is like.
Naturally, this places limits on what, linguistically, he can attempt. When Eilis ventures into Manhattan for the first time, and we read that "She could see no difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan… except that the cold from the subway seemed more severe and dry and the wind more fierce," it is hard not to feel that Tóibín is short-selling the city's attractions. But his judgement—and who are we to disagree?—is that Manhattan's skyscrapers would have made no impression on a young woman from provincial Ireland. What Eilis herself doesn't see or think, Tóibín makes no attempt to describe.
Some of the most powerful passages in the book address themselves to Eilis's mental anguish, the product initially of her homesickness and later of her increasingly troubled love life. The fact that Eilis is an immigrant means, of course, that she is poised between two worlds, and Tóibín brilliantly evokes the oddly unstable quality that memory has in such situations; the way a person's most basic feelings about the past can suddenly change. A few weeks after arriving in Brooklyn, Eilis receives her first letters from home and is thrown into despair. "That night," Tóibín writes, "was the worst she had ever spent." But a day or two later, Eilis pulls herself together, and soon the world of Enniscorthy recedes; Brooklyn comes to occupy the foreground. Later, though, when she returns to Ireland, her sense of belonging in America proves, in turn, to be illusory, and within a couple of weeks she comes to feel that it was all a "dream from which she had awoken with considerable force." These shifts feel entirely life-like, true to the fluctuations that accompany any geographical wrench.
The period Brooklyn is set in was, of course, one in which difficult emotions weren't often acknowledged. This makes the novel's focus on Eilis's inner life striking. What Tóibín is doing is in a sense anachronistic: he is bringing a contemporary sensibility, one versed in the language of inner "conflict," to bear on a world for which such concepts had little meaning. But Tóibín handles this collision with great delicacy—and this delicacy is largely the product of his language. Although his focus on Eilis's inner life belongs to a world removed from that of the novel, the language he uses—simple and declarative—grounds his narrative in the era in which it is set.
In this respect, Tóibín's approach differs markedly from that of Ian McEwan in On Chesil Beach, another recent (and much praised) historical novel set during roughly the same period. McEwan's novel has a didactic quality: it is full of ironical observations about how life before the sexual revolution differed from today. The result is to create a clear sense of division between then and now, and McEwan's approach, intentionally or not, feels condescending: the past is a problem that social progress has helped overcome. But Tóibín's novel offers no such lessons, and is far more satisfying as a result. Brooklyn is a work of historical fiction in which "history" hardly seems the point. Its targets are the unvarying dilemmas of the human heart.
This article first appeared in the May 2009 edition of Prospect
