Tóibín pens a polished sequel to ‘Brooklyn’

Colm Tóibín is no fan of sequels. In fact, he “doesn’t think novelists should do them”, he told The New York Times Book Review podcast recently. Yet he has written one, prompted by an image that came to him, he said in the same podcast, suddenly, epiphanically. A disgruntled man knocks on a woman’s door to deliver some shocking news.

Her husband has got his wife pregnant, and he will under no circumstances be raising the “brat” in his home.

woman in question is Eilis Lacey, the protagonist of Tóibín’s much-loved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, which was subsequently adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Saoirse Ronan.

Brooklyn charted Eilis’s migration from Enniscorthy to New York in the early 1950s. A timely book – its publication coincided with the latest wave of departures prompted by the 2008 financial crash – it remains widely celebrated for its deft characterisation and credible portrayal of the Irish immigrant experience.

The sequel, Long Island, begins 20 years later and has Eilis return home, partly in protest over her husband Tony’s infidelity. Her two children, Larry and Rosella, follow her to Ireland, relishing an opportunity to see a country to which they, through their mother, are necessarily attached, but of which they know little.

Eilis’s last visit home, occasioned by the sudden death of her sister, proved seismic. Though recently married to Tony, she began an affair with Jim Farrell, a local publican. She fell in love and considered staying in Ireland, but in the end was left with little choice but to return to New York.

Why? Shortly after she left the city, and unbeknownst to her, Madge Kehoe, her Irish-American landlady, found out about her marriage and told a cousin in Wexford. Eilis reasoned that Jim would never knowingly consort with a married woman.

Given such a background, a rekindling of this romance feels inevitable, and happen it does. Indeed, much of Long Island’s busy plot stems from the many complications that surround Jim and Eilis’s clandestine relationship.

Could she stay in Ireland? If so, what about her children? Their connection to Eilis’s homeland is as tenuous as hers was to America when she first arrived. And whether she likes it or not, the locals now perceive her as an outsider and a strangely glamorous one; people in the town comment on the exotic air she has about her.

Besides, she is no longer the passive young woman of Brooklyn, and any hint of independence, of course, stands out in comparatively backward Ireland.

As in his most successful novels, in Long Island Tóibín manages to elevate what in other hands would all too easily become ingredients for a soap opera-like potboiler. Though secrecy and its close relative gossip, abiding themes across his fiction, are the fuel that drives the plot forward, they are never exploited for pruThe rient ends. Rather, it is through them that the hopes, dreams and resentments – things often unsaid – of its principal characters are most intimately explored.

Long Island is written in the disciplined, polished prose for which Tóibín is known, and the odd Banvillean flourish he allows himself – “the soft, incessant sound of waves breaking on the strand below” – comes off all the more lyrical for it.

Then there is his extraordinary command of voice. Few can so authentically ventriloquise Irish speech, with its unwitting poeticisms – heaven described as one’s “eternal reward” – and repetitions and redundancies.

For all his reservations about sequels, Tóibín, a writer evidently at the height of his powers, has written a remarkably good one.