Published in 2009, this is by Colum Toibin (author of The Magician, which I read and enjoyed a while ago.

My audio-version was beautifully read by Saoirse Ronan.

It starts slow, this book. But it's none the worse for that, and it becomes much more dramatic as it goes on.

It's another story about migration, a favourite topic of mine. It's the 1950s, and Eilis Lacey, of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, can find no work. Her brothers have already gone to work in England, but all Eilis can secure is a temporary job in the grocery shop of the redoubtable Miss Kelly. Father Flood, an Irish priest now ministering in the US, and Rose, Eilis's sister, arrange for her to work in Brooklyn. It's a great opportunity, but you can't help but feel that everything has been arranged over Eilis's head. She has had little say in it all.


Brooklyn Bridge

The next section is a classic migration story. We see (graphically) the miseries of seasickness, and (poignantly) the trials of homesickness.

But most of all there's the humdrum business of gaining a foothold in a new country. Toibin describes Eilis's work in a department store, and the restricted life she lives in Mrs Kehoe's boarding-house, with all its little resentments and intrigues. The tedium of the week is alleviated just a little by the parish dance on Friday evenings. Soon (partly as a way to address her debilitating homesickness), evening classes in book-keeping are added to the day's routine..

And bit by bit, Brooklyn starts to feel like home. Soon, a boyfriend, Tony, is added to the mix. He was born in Brooklyn, but his family migrated from Italy. The Irish and Italian communities don't seem to like each other much.

That tension is just part of the ethnic patchwork visible in Brooklyn. One of Eilis's teachers at night school is a Jew who lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Black shoppers, meanwhile, now find their buying power welcome at the department store where Eilis works, but they don't exactly pass unnoticed.

A different side of the Irish community can be seen in the old Irish men who come to the church Christmas dinner. They're the labourers who once helped build the city's bridges and tunnels and highways. Now they're "leftover Irishmen"; they're very poor, many of them, and they're lonely. Why don't they go home, Eilis asks. They've been here for 50 years, Father Flood explains. They have nothing to go home to.

The unexpected death of Rose, Eilis's sister, is the traumatic event that moves the book up a gear. It somehow acts as a hothouse for Eilis's relationship with Tony. He is, admittedly, very kind to her in her bereavement, and she has now been introduced to his family. Still, you feel that it's grief that leads first to a sexual encounter (never easy in a boarding-house, and apparently unprotected, although they get away with it) and then to a secret marriage, before Eilis heads back to Ireland to spend time with her mother.

With the sheen of America upon her, the returneed is much more noticed in Enniscorthy than she was when she lived there.


This is a great collection of pictures of 1950s Brooklyn

Of course, the death of the only child who was still living with Mrs Lacey also makes Eilis's migrant dilemma more acute. Her mother never opposed the idea of Eilis's going overseas (that a priest promoted it surely helped). But it's never easy to be the one left behind. Before Eilis first sets sail for New York, a neighbour comments, almost casually: "You'll miss her when she's gone, I'd say." And Mrs Lacey replies: "Oh, it'll kill me when she goes..." The death of Rose means she is now completely on her own, and Eilis is painfully aware of this.

This is partly why she just can't bring herself to tell her mother about Tony. Talking about him, she feels, will just underline to her mother that this return to Enniscorthy is a brief interlude, and she will soon be going away again. Mum doesn't say so directly (because hardly anyone says anything directly in Eilis's family), but she'd obviously prefer Eilis not to go back, and looks with a kindly eye on her daughter's rekindled friendship with Nancy, her new-found ability to find work that could be permanent, and -- particularly -- an incipient romance with Jim Farrell. Yes, a romance... Because Eilis hasn't just kept her mother in the dark about Tony; she's kept everyone in the dark.

Until almost the end -- and this is very cleverly done, and gets quite tense -- we're on tenterhooks: Is Eilis going back, or is she staying? It's clear that she regrets what was undeniably a precipitate marriage. But what can she do? Jim is conventional; he wouldn't look well either on adultery or on divorce. Yes, she's being duplicitous; in effect she's stringing Jim along. But you somehow can't criticize her. This new scenario that has presented itself seems to solve so many problems: She'd be near her mother; Jim is kind, and has good prospects. But there's Tony...

She tries to pray, but knows the outcome: "The answer was that there was no answer, that nothing she could do would be right... And she saw all three of them -- Tony, Jim, her mother -- as figures whom she could only damage, as innocent people surrounded by light and clarity, and circling around them was herself, dark, uncertain."

In the end, her hand is forced, by the malevolent gossip and veiled threats of Miss Kelly (who turns out -- in perhaps the only slightly unlikely coincidence -- to be related to Mrs Kehoe, and has therefore come to know about Eilis's marital status). A nice touch, though. It's Miss Kelly's nastiness that made Eilis feel she'd do anything for a real job, even if it meant going to America, and it's Miss Kelly's spitefulness that makes sure she returns there.

Eilis brings her mother rapidly up to date, ditches poor Jim, and hot-sails it back to America. On the first leg of the long journey back, Eilis imagines poor Jim visiting her mother to ask for clarification. "'She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And as the train rolled past Macmine Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more."

Why does she smile, I wonder... Relief that the decision is made? The recollection that she has already cleared a path in Brooklyn, and can successfully resume it? Is it just the exhilaration that always strikes when the hard parting that you've been dreading is behind you, and you're back on the road? Or is that smile essentially bittersweet, a rueful acknowledgement that we're always hurting someone, including ourselves, and as soon as our experience encompasses two different places, we will always regret the one we're not currently in?


Eilis and Tony enjoyed outings to Coney Island. This is the beach in 1950

***

Eilis comes across as a curiously passive character. People make decisions for her; circumstances push her one direction or another. But as John Mullan points out, what drives her is restraint. She steels herself not to think, not to regret, not to complain. And she respects restraint in others. Jim's, for example. Restraint also characterizes the novel's dialogue. Eilis's family just don't tell each other things... They're a big contrast with Tony's vociferous clan.

What Toibin is focusing on, says Liam McIlvanney, is not so much the different worlds Eilis finds herself in as her evolving response to them: "The novel is, to a large extent, the story of Eilis’s impressions, her reflections, her winning through to a mature self-consciousness. Toibin’s aim is not to document 1950s Irish-American Brooklyn through Eilis’s eyes -- though coincidentally he does do this. Rather, and far more interestingly, his aim is to render the inner world of Eilis Lacey."

She's a great observer, and likes putting her impressions into letters to her sister and mother back home. But there's also a lot she can't write about, and "it is what Eilis cannot put in a letter that gives Brooklyn its narrative bite... Brooklyn, we begin to understand, is the story of what Eilis leaves out." The bit she doesn't pass on is a story of hard yakka and tedious routine; of a work superior called Miss Fortini who takes a little too much interest in supervising Eilis's bathing-costume purchase; of the fierce winter weather that made America "the coldest place on earth".


Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs, Coney Island, 1954

***

There's so much in this book that resonates with my own experience and that of others I know. I was a child of the 1960s, not the 1950s, but the mindset of keeping things quiet definitely coloured my family life with a kind of greywash, just as it does Eilis's.

And the partings... Eilis's mother ("it'll kill me") reminded me of a story I was told about my father-in-law and his family. When his brother migrated to New Zealand (as a "Ten Pound Pom"), something was snuffed out in their mother's life for ever. When Eilis returns to New York, her mother says goodbye the evening before, and retires to her room, to avoid seeing her daughter leave in the morning. When we said goodbye to my father-in-law for what turned out to be the last time, he wouldn't come to the door.

As a description of homesickness (which I felt acutely during my first semester's study in Germany, for example -- so piercingly that everything I experienced was filtered through that emotion), Brooklyn is brilliant: "She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything... Nothing here was part of her. It was false and empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday." I definitely remember that feeling...

But Toibin also shows us how human resilience eventually kicks in. You start to get used to things, and then start to take pleasure in them. And, eventually, you're fine (except when you're ambushed by certain triggers -- for me it was hearing a train in the distance). But then there's the disconcerting, disorienting homecoming... Again, this rang very true to me, although this time the experience I was remembering was the return from a longer period away, when we'd taken up residence in New Zealand. Everything in what was once your home-country is familiar, and yet everything is changed. It's utterly bewildering.

And, as Eilis finds, no-one is that interested, not in any detail anyway, about your daily life "over there". I don't know why. Maybe we migrants are just less interesting than we think we are. Or maybe showing an interest makes relatives feel they're just encouraging us in this staying-away folly. If they display no curiosity, maybe we'll come to our senses, and come home.

***

All in all, this was a moving and evocative novel. The ultimate tribute I can pay is that I've moved straight on to its sequel, Long Island...


The Wonder Wheel, 1950