Long Island by Colm Tóibín review – the sequel to Brooklyn is a masterclass in subtlety and intelligence
The great thing about writing a sequel is that you can go straight in with the action, and no need to worry about setting the scene. Colm Tóibín certainly does that in Long Island, the followup to his 2009 novel Brooklyn. That book shifted Tóibín from being a respected, prize-friendly literary novelist to a commercial success: his publishers’ publicity materials at the time accurately predicted that it would be his “breakout novel” , which would “do for him what Atonement did for [Ian] McEwan”.
Brooklyn succeeded artistically and commercially because it told a simple story well: a satisfyingly sad tale of thwarted love in 1950s Ireland. It featured Eilis Lacey, a young woman living in Tóibín’s old stamping ground of Enniscorthy, a town in County Wexford near the country’s south-east coast. In Brooklyn, Eilis went to the US and secretly married, came back to Ireland for a family death and then hampered her mother’s hopes by returning to America rather than settling down with local boy Jim Farrell. Her decision seemed to surprise Eilis as much as it did the reader: her dominant characteristic in Brooklyn was a maddening passivity toward her own destiny – at least, right until the moment she decided to return to America.
In Long Island, 20 years have passed and we’re in the mid-1970s: the date is never specified, but references to Vietnam and Watergate help orient us. Eilis Lacey is now Eilis Fiorello, living with her Italian-American husband, Tony, and teenage children, Rosella and Larry – ominously, Tony’s brothers and parents live right next door.
The drama Tóibín uses to kick off the story is a strange man calling at
Eilis’s door; he tells her, in short order, that Tony, a plumber, has been spending a lot of time with the man’s wife and “his plumbing is so good that she is to have a baby in August”. Furthermore, “as soon as this little bastard is born, I am transporting it here. And if you are not at home […] I’ll leave it right here on your doorstep.” And so the moment of crisis, which in Brooklyn took a long time to appear, this time informs the whole book, and invests it with an appetising tension from the start.
Eilis is unsurprisingly thrown by the news, and doesn’t know who to turn to. “There must be some number she could call.” But we quickly learn that she has changed since Brooklyn: two decades of marriage, of creating her own family and dealing with Tony’s, have seen to that, and she is no longer meek or passive. When she argues with Tony’s father, brother Enzo asks Tony, “Can you not control her?” He can’t. “A part of her life was ended,” Eilis concludes, and now she must decide where the rest of it lies.
The answer, at least for a time, is back in Enniscorthy, where she heads for a holiday to mark her mother’s 80th birthday, bringing her children with her. (“You never told me about cheese and onion crisps or salt and vinegar,” enthuses Larry, discovering Ireland’s pubs.) This is fertile territory for Tóibín, who has always been good on mothers, from early novels The Story of the Night and The Blackwater Lightship to the story collection Mothers and Sons. Eilis, escaping Tony’s mother who has plans for the new baby, runs straight into the stubbornness of her own mother, who refuses to let workmen install the new kitchen appliances Eilis has bought her, and furthermore tells Eilis that she has sold her house and that Eilis won’t be getting a whisker of the proceeds.
Still, the gang’s all here: not just family but Eilis’s old best friend Nancy, now running a chip shop, and old flame Jim Farrell, who owns the family pub. Nancy and Jim have drifted together in recent years, sneaking into each other’s houses to sleep together, and have become engaged, albeit without much enthusiasm. Tóibín takes us into both their heads, switching between Eilis, Nancy and Jim, each voice as convincing as the others.
But it’s not only Eilis who has changed in Long Island: Ireland is changing, too. And change hurts: some locals are appalled by the smells from Nancy’s newfangled chip shop, others scandalised by boisterous singing at a wedding. Some things, though, stay the same: it’s clear that Jim never got over Eilis.
Long Island often reads like a masterclass in everything Tóibín can do. Minor characters are as well drawn as the main players: an irascible woman selling a plot of land (“she likes a fuss”, the estate agent warns the purchaser) only gets two pages but is a vivid highlight. There is subtle comedy – a man at a wedding directs Nancy around the floor “like a man driving a tractor” – and an eye for detail, as Nancy gets excited about the prospect of introducing the toasted cheese sandwich to Ireland’s pubs.
There are a few misses. Some characters – Tony’s brother, Frank, Eilis’s brother, Jack – seem to be there only to smooth the plot with unexpected interventions, but the plot doesn’t need to be smoothed. This is a book, after all, that shows how blind we are to our own motivations, and how resistant to rationality. Late in the story, Eilis tosses up reasons to do or not do a particular act, “but the reasons she thought of made no difference”. Long Island shows also our need to control those closest to us, and in this respect reminded me of Maeve Brennan’s great collection of Dublin stories, The Springs of Affection.
The plot picks up pace – perhaps too much pace – in the last 50 pages, where events pile up in a way that threatens to violate the story’s slow build, and characters behave with unusual cunning and elan. But with so many motivations muffled, who can say what is plausible anyway? Much of the interest in Long Island lies in what is not said: when someone is asked a question but doesn’t answer; when Jim finds that “there was nothing to say […] nothing he could find the words for now”; or when a character enters a room looking for someone, finds it empty, and the reader’s heart drops three floors. These silences and absences at the core of this subtle, intelligent and moving book mean the reader has to do a certain amount of work – but it is work very well rewarded.
• Long Island by Colm Tóibín is published by Pan Macmillan (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Much of the interest here lies in what is not said: when someone is asked a question but doesn’t answer
navigate when you’re trying to be creative.”
The influence of The Office – its naturalism, its lack of a laughter track, and an enduring American offshoot – is still felt. And while Merchant has carved out a wildly successful, but relatively low-key career in the US, Gervais has got louder and has leant into culture wars, his Netflix specials condemned by LGBTQ groups. I wonder what role Gervais plays in Merchant’s life today? They’re always going to be linked in people’s minds, he says: “As a collaborator he couldn’t have been better. We did a lot of really good work and maybe we will again. But we’ve been doing our own thing for quite a while now.” He wouldn’t revisit old projects. “That feels dangerous. But also one of the things I’ve been enjoying with The Outlaws is working with other writers who are from different backgrounds to me, or younger, a different perspective in order to try to keep one foot in the real world.”
This was a world he was last part of in the early 2000s, an odd time for comedy. I read a quote from Merchant a few years ago, about telling Russell Brand that he was a cult leader who would poison the Kool-Aid, then take the last sip. “I guess that’s borne out to some degree. There was always something kind of messianic about him, a sort of worship by his fanbase. I also accused him of being a man who appears to have read the back of a lot of books.”
The new series of The Outlawsbegins with a body: the group are thrown abruptly into the centre of a criminal web and must fight for their lives while also spreading manure to their exacting community payback officer’s satisfaction. As with The Office, where a group of ordinary people were made extraordinary by the arrival of a documentary crew, so are Merchant’s offenders, by the arrival of a corpse. “Again it’s those ‘lives of quiet desperation’.” He says, thoughtfully: “I think there’s probably a part of me that was always scared of getting trapped in some life I didn’t want, and waking up at 50 and going, ‘What have I done?’ or ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Is this the person I wanted to be?’”
It’s this concern, a worry since childhood, that has fed his work ever since. “I haven’t done anything that features aliens or superheroes, not because I don’t enjoy those things, but because it feels as if there’s a lot of interesting people down in the pub without having to have them land from outer space.” His character in The Outlaws is a painfully awkward lawyer “who made one significant mistake that has put a fire under him. And even though he’s anxious about everything, he’ll get to 70 and go, ‘Remember when I was a drug dealer that time?’ Like, he’ll have a story to tell. And there’s value in that.”
What sort of life was Merchant scared of ? “A job that I just drifted into, that wasn’t an ambition, just something to pay the bills. And I’m not trying to demonise those things. But I was anxious about waking up in the morning and dreading going to work, just looking forward to the weekend.” His brow furrows. “It makes me sound very condescending but – I had seen it among certain people I knew growing up. And there seemed to be this sort of disquiet in them, this frustration. I’m aware it’s a very privileged position to be in, but I’m lucky that I’ve avoided that.”
Merchant’s avoidancehas takenhim through comedy and into drama. He hadn’t heard of Stephen Port, who killed four gay men between June 2014 and September 2015, before he took the role in Four Lives. He played Port with a sinister and exquisite creepiness, allowing the story – of major police failings – to play out around him. “It was the first time I had done a project where I felt a responsibility to the truth and to the families. And I felt an anxiety about that, about doing a good job, and not having an audience giggle because they associate me with comedy.” He chose not to meet Port. “I did hear though that the real guy was disappointed that they’d cast me. Apparently he’d wanted Eddie Redmayne.” He shrugs apologetically.
The process of making the drama changed him. “We are in a culture in which the police are portrayed in a particular way. There’s always one lone detective who solves it, who keeps diligently working away until they crack the case. And Port’s case was a reminder that those people are quite rare, if they exist at all. The police force is inevitably a big bureaucracy where people aren’t talking to each other. And I don’t know if it’s institutionalised homophobia or incompetence or if it’s just a lack of joined up thinking, it could be all of those things. I’m loth to just demonise the police because I don’t know if it’s as clearcut as that.” The families, he says quietly, must have felt like they were drowning.
That project was maybe an extreme example of what Merchant describes, in assumed quote marks as, “A very eclectic career” – standup, writing, producing, directing, comedic acting and dramatic acting. “If I had chosen just one thing to do, people might have a very clear idea of who I am. But because I’ve done a lot of different things, people will perhaps recognise my name and they might enjoy something I’ve done, but they wouldn’t necessarily be aware of all the other stuff.” He thinks. “This is a bit absurd to say, given that apparently I’m the most successful man ever in comedy in Britain. But I think sometimes I feel a little underappreciated, in a weird way.” People are surprised when he tells them he’s directed a film, or played a murderer – they think of him still as Gervais’s sidekick.
“There’s probably a part of me that’s like, ‘I’ve done a lot of stuff. I do it quite well. I’ve been doing it a long time.’” He looks slightly embarrassed now, and
I suggest that maybe the self-deprecating characters he writes for himself, the awkward lanky fools he likes to play, might compound that feeling. “Yes, I’ve realised that people assume that’s also me. The talkshow persona where I’m telling a story about how I’m an idiot. Yes, why didn’t I give myself a role as a sort of James Bond type suave secret agent instead of playing the putz? I am aware of that as a failing, or as a mistake.” He worries sometimes that by doing a bit of everything, “There’s a danger of not doing anything.” But then he leans back and nods. “But I think, as long as I make it into the Bafta in memoriam section when I die, I’ll be happy.” He grins. “That’ll be enough.”
The Outlaws starts on BBC One and iPlayer on 30 May
Styling by Tiffani Moreno; photographer’s assistant Jesse Belvin; grooming by Katie Evans using Kate Hollinshead, Chantecaille Skincare and Unite Haircare; shot at Studio 60, LA
I’ve been enjoying working with other writers who are from different backgrounds to me