Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

The book follows Eilis Lacey, a young girl on the verge of womanhood but with limited prospects in 1950s rural Ireland. She’s studying bookkeeping but despite being ‘good with numbers’ can only get a Sunday job serving in a local grocery.

Her elder sister has contacts at the golf club and soon it is arranged, almost without Eilis’s involvement, that she will go to the land of opportunity, America - specifically Brooklyn - where there is an established Irish community and an ex-pat priest who can smooth her path to employment and lodgings.

The experiences of the voyage to New York and of immigrant life in the cultural melting pot of Brooklyn are the meat of the central section of the work (interesting but not, to me, riveting). Ironically as the homesickness is overcome and she begins to carve out her new life she is called back to Ireland; older, more experienced and suddenly with a choice of prospects, she faces the dilemma of whether to stay put or return to what she has left behind in Brooklyn.

In my ignorance I assumed Colm Toibin was a woman such was the intense focus on Eilis and her life, with only the photo inside the back cover putting me right. Maybe my own gender contributed to a lack of empathy for Eilis for most of the book. She is a bit of a mouse, generally following the line of least resistance; but at the end as the pressure (not quite excitement – Eilis does not do excitement) builds the question is will she finally decide for herself what we wants for her future?

The writing is understated, in line with Elis’s character, but subtly builds up layers of feeing and experience that shape and influence an ordinary life. It clearly impressed the critics, leading to the Man Booker long list and a Costa award, but it won’t make it onto my ‘books of the year’ list.