Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn sequel is the best new novel you’ll read in years
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How does a writer revive their best-loved characters? How do they pay service to a story for which hundreds of thousands of readers fell, while advancing it so that the new work is its own substantive, surprising feat? If you’re Colm Tóibín, the answer is: with apparent ease. This isn’t to undermine the grand achievement of Long Island, his long awaited sequel to 2009’s Brooklyn. It’s to say instead that a part of Tóibín’s genius is the lack of visible effort with which he draws us in, so seamless that we barely register our new surroundings by the time we’re consumed.
Long Island opens with a soap-opera-style blindside. Eilis, the protagonist of Brooklyn, has now been in that New York suburb for 20 years with her husband Tony. They have two teenage children, Larry and Rosella, and are living in suburban mundanity. Eilis may be frustrated by the overbearing intimacy of her extended Italian family, and by her waning physical affection with Tony; nonetheless, she has been committed to the man, nation and way of life she chose at Brooklyn’s end.
In an instant, the equanimity of her choices and the moderate emotions of her middle age are shaken loose. A man from the neighbourhood arrives on her doorstep. He comes bearing news: that his wife has been impregnated by Tony. He lets Eilis know in no uncertain terms that he will not allow the child to stay in his home: as soon as it is born, he will drop it at her and Tony’s door.
Eilis, furious and unable to tolerate the notion of the child being part of her life, makes the decision to return to Ireland for an indefinite period, for the first time since her departure decades ago. She travels alone initially, later to be joined by her children, who will be visiting their mother’s homeland for the first time. It’s here, in Wexford, where most of the novel plays out, encompassing Eilis’s grief for her tainted marriage and uncertain future, but also, with as much depth and weight, the lives of those who remained in Ireland. In particular, there’s Jim Farrell, the man she left for Tony and America, and her old friend and confidante Nancy Sheridan, who has been widowed and now makes an uneasy living operating the local chip-shop. Old dynamics, memories and calcified silences between them are exposed; what had seemed inevitable is called into question.
Long Island is a rarity. After I began, I could barely stand to do anything else but finish it. The country to which Eilis returns in some ways appears spookily unchanged, but each subsequent, tender scene Tóibín gives us with those she left behind reveals the accumulated shifts, some brutally swift and some brutally gradual, which have changed them all in her absence. This is a galling truth for which the returning emigrant sometimes neglects to account.
Nothing rang more painfully true to me than the bristling reception Eilis’s mother gives her, caught between relief at her daughter’s return and offence at the absurd amount of time it took Eilis to come back. That insulted pride at having been left behind for so long, and replaced by the vulgar vastness of America, competes with her fierce adoration of her daughter and grandchildren.
These portraits, so rich and vivid and precise, would be well enough to recommend Long Island effusively, but Tóibín gives us an unexpected last-act development; I won’t spoil it here, but it upends you in an entirely other way. Here is the gripping drama of life, action, movement, and on the same page, the magic of witnessing multiple silent consciousnesses circling one another.
There is a kind of powerful calm in this novel, both on a sentence level and in the stately pace of the unfurling story. You feel that this is the destined culmination of a remarkable, lustrous career; you can experience not just your own enjoyment as a reader, but also Tóibín’s in the writing of it. That enjoyment, lacking in self-satisfaction as only a work of art born of diligent care, craft and curiosity could be, reverbates on each page. Long Island is the best new novel I’ve read in years – and it’s as persuasive an argument in defence of the unique capability of the novel form as you could ever hope to find.
Megan Nolan is the author of Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings. Long Island is published by Picador at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
