Colm Tóibín is a wonderful writer, and Brooklyn appeared to a rapturous critical reception. It was rumoured to be a strong contender for the Booker Prize and it’s been dominating the critics’ ‘Best of 2009′ lists. All of which puts me in a tiny majority when I say that I found it all rather disappointing.
As always with Tóibín, the writing is impeccable, and there is a wonderful melancholy air hanging over the entire novel, a grim sadness which leads one to expect a story with more grief than it in fact contains. It’s fashionable to characterise Irish writing as ‘miserable’, and we are frequently pointed to modern examples such as Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture. Both of those books deserve a more considered response than that, and Tóibín’s deserves the same respect.
Brooklyn is the story of a young woman forced to emigrate to the United States because of the lack of opportunity in her native Ireland of the 1950s. Although gender barriers across Europe had taken an enormous hit thanks to the efforts of women during the just finished war, the benefits of greater equality had not found their way to southern Ireland. Eilis is expected to find a prosperous young man and marry him, even though the choice is poor, and the parochialism of the local men depressing.
Eilis heads for America under the protection of the church, and finds work there in a department store. There, she struggles with loneliness and homesickness. Just as she begins to find her feet, news from Ireland calls her home.
The tension in Brooklyn centres on Eilis’s decision once she gets back to Ireland. Will she stay and sink back into the old, and by her new lights old-fashioned, ways of a patriarchal society, or will she return to the land of the future? In many ways, this can be seen as a parallel for the choice that faced much of the world at the same time. Sink back into the past, dominated by an elite of men, or forge a path into the democratic, technology-dominated future?
The reason I found Brooklyn underwhelming is that it seems to promise rather more conflict and misery than it delivers, like a horror movie with no scares, just ominous music. This leads to a rather overwrought feeling to the writing, even if it is in other respects beautifully controlled. It’s not a bad novel, not by any means, but it is rather conventional in narrative structure, plot, characterisation and outcome, and I’ve come to expect more than that from Tóibín.
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