Brooklyn
Colm Toibin
Offer Price: £7.99
RRP: £7.99
Book notes
Eilis Lacey has little choice in the matter when her widowed mother and elder sister, Rose, arrange for her to emigrate to America in the early 1950s. She’s unhappy about going, but with little hope of finding a decent job in the provincial, gossipy Irish town where they live, her prospects are considered brighter in New York - not least because she will escape the future burden of caring for her ageing mother, a role which unmarried Rose is tacitly prepared to take on. At first, Eilis - reserved, intelligent, innocent - is tearfully homesick, lodging in a boarding house and working as a sales assistant in a Brooklyn department store. But gradually she gains in confidence, doing well in her job, studying at night school to improve her career opportunities, and going out dancing with friends. Then two things happen: she falls for a good-looking Italian-American who is desperate to marry her; and a family tragedy demands her return to Ireland. A commitment she makes to her boyfriend before leaving New York is undone by something wholly unexpected back home, leading to an impossible dilemma and a mean-minded act of spite. This elegant novel of love and loss, desire and duty, is made all the more intense by the understated storytelling and deceptively simple writing.
About the author
Writer and journalist Colm Tóibín, the second youngest of five children, was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland, in 1955, and was educated at University College Dublin where he read history and English. After graduating in 1975, he headed to Barcelona, the city that later inspired his first novel, The South, the story of an Irish woman who leaves her husband and begins a relationship with a Spanish painter. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book. During the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, first in Ireland and then in Argentina, the Sudan and Egypt. Two of his novels The Blackwater Lightship, published in 1999, and The Master, published in 2004, were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. As well as writing novels, he is the author of a number of works of non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E M Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brooklyn, which is partly set in his home town of Enniscorthy, won best novel in last year’s Costa Book Awards.
Discussion points
- Why doesn’t Eilis protest against the decision to ship her off to New York?
- Sometimes she seems compliant, at other times self-contained, even self-assured. How would you describe Eilis’s character?
- Is America good for her?
- Why is she so unsure of her feelings for Tony? Does she do the right thing by him before her trip back to Ireland?
- The closeness of the community in Enniscorthy draws Eilis back, but does it also betray her?
- Whatever decision she makes in the end, someone will get hurt. Does she make the right decision? Does she have a choice in the matter?
- The author says Jane Austen had an influence on the writing of the book. Where can you see that influence?
- What does the book say about being an immigrant?
- Does Eilis’s mother act selfishly?
- What does the future hold for Eilis?
Author's view
I heard the story of Brooklyn late in 1967. Eilis’s mother came to the house and I think it was told when she had left. I remembered it. I must have been a little novelist then aged twelve. I waited forty years to write it. I wrote it because I had been going back and forth to teach in the United States and I had felt pangs of homesickness, and also because the strangeness of homecoming began to affect me. I wrote it because I noticed all the Poles and Chinese and Nigerians in Ireland and began to imagine how they felt about home, or their new home, or the spaces in between. I wrote it also because I had been teaching Jane Austen and paying special attention to how she built plot and character, how she dealt with groups and solitude and how she concentrated on one character and gave that character a special inwardness which made her attractive to people in the novel and to readers of the book. Also, I had built a house near home, in the place where we had gone on our holidays each summer which was filled with memories for me and had not changed much. One night in that new house I realised what could be done with such a simple story if I could trust it enough, play no tricks with it, have no flashback scenes for example. Just write the story down and try to make the details truthful.
I used some moments from Jane Austen, especially in the first dance in the book when Jim is almost rude to Eilis which I based on Mr Darcy being rude to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. I also made some of the characters comic and just plain bad so that Eilis’s character could emerge more clearly. She is conscientious, serious, not self-assertive, not highly self-conscious. She wants a quiet life. Nonethless, as with Catherine Sloper, say, in Henry James’s Washington Square, her feelings run deep. She notices things. She does not trust anything or anyone too quickly. When people like her and trust her, this is not the result of much effort on her part.
The novel is made for this sort of character. She is not exactly a heroine. And yet I think that if I could offer her enough life, enough detailed noticing, that she might come alive and her plight could enter the reader’s imagination.
Brooklyn is a quiet book, a book set in the years after a war, when the world was slowly becoming settled. Eilis is part of this world. I was determined that such a book could still be written, playing with quietness, trying to make quietness interesting, believing that the politics and poetics of migration remain a very large subject, as does the idea of home, or the pull of love versus duty. I was also interested in the glamorous image of the United States versus the cold winter of New York, or the loneliness of arriving there for the first time, knowing that you had lost home and now had no choice but to make the best of things.