Reading Matters

'Brooklyn' by Colm Tóibín

Fiction - hardcover; Viking; 256 pages; 2009.

Reviews of Booker long-listed novels on this site are a bit like London buses. You don't get any for ages, then two come along in quick succession.

Following on from yesterday's review of Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind, is Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, another from this year's longlist.

As long time readers of this blog will know, I have a soft spot for Irish fiction, so it was no great surprise that this would be my type of book. But what I did find surprising was just how much I liked it. I devoured it in just two sittings this past weekend.

The book opens in poor, provincial 1950s Ireland -- Enniscorthy, County Wexford to be precise. Eilis Lacey, a part-time shop girl, leaves behind her mother and devoted older sister, Rose, to immigrate to Brooklyn, USA, in search of a better life. She lives in an all-girl boarding house, presided over by the matron-like Mrs Kehoe, and spends her days working in a local department store and her evenings studying for a book-keeping qualification at Brooklyn College. Along the way she makes several friends, meets a boy and finds herself living a relatively contented life, despite the fact that she still misses her family back home.

I'm not sure I can really say anything else without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I shall keep schutm, suffice to say this is a quietly devastating read, one in which it is completely possible to lose all track of time as you get lost in the world presented here.

Brooklyn is a gentle read, but its gentleness should not be mistaken for shallowness, because this is a story that's profoundly moving and tickles the grey matter in ways you might not quite expect. It might be set in the 1950s but it touches on universal themes that resonate today, and I've yet to read anything that so perfectly captures the profound sense of dislocation you feel when you swap one country for another and then return to your homeland for the first time.

In short, Brooklyn is a superb paean to homesickness and the émigré experience. I think I identified with it so strongly because it shows, in an understated but powerful manner, how all emigrants have to make that god-awful decision about whether to stay or go, a decision that paralysed me for years. When Eilis is confronted with this very kind of choice she is tormented because there is no one right answer: whatever she chooses will have both negative and positive repercussions for herself and her loved ones.

And while I've tried to avoid reading reviews of this book, fearful that it will put me off reading it, I'm conscious Brooklyn has drawn criticism from some quarters over Eilis's passive nature, yet I did not see her that way at all. Sure, her move to Brooklyn is organised by others, namely Father Flood and Rose, but she recognises this as an opportunity for which she should be grateful, even if she finds the prospect of leaving all she knows behind a daunting one. She's proactive enough to get herself educated while in Brooklyn, because she recognises this as another opportunity to better herself in ways which would not be possible "back home". The truly lovely thing about Eilis is that she is a good person, and she thereby attracts good people and many acts of kindness come her way, but her good manners and her unwillingness to rock the boat should not be mistaken for passivity.

Whether Brooklyn makes tomorrow's Booker cut, I cannot say, but it deserves a wide readership regardless: it's a powerful story about culture shock and the life-changing decisions we all must make as we grow up and forge our own paths. I rather suspect it's going to be one of those books that will stay with me a long time...

'The Blackwater Lightship' by Colm Toibin

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 272 pages; 2000.

This quiet, understated novel, the fourth by Irish writer Colm Tóibín, was short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize and the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. And with good reason. It is a beautiful heartfelt book about three generations of women, estranged for years, who must join forces to look after one of their own who has a serious life-threatening illness.

Helen, the central character, is a 30-something school teacher married with two young boys, who has managed to carve out a comfortable existence in Dublin. But despite her career success and ordered life, she hides a guilty secret: as a college student she had a falling out with her mother, Lily, and has not talked to her since. In fact Lily was not invited to Helen's wedding and she has never met her grandsons.

Helen's relationship with her grandmother, Dora, is not quite as strained, but Dora and Lily are particularly tetchy with one another and rarely talk.

But these personal histories, filled with pain, hurt and anger, must be cast aside when Helen's younger brother, Declan, announces he has AIDS. For the first time in decades the three women are thrown together by circumstances beyond their control.

When a very ill Declan says he wants to stay in his grandmother's falling-down house by the Wexford coast, the three women, all strong-willed and contrary, find their tense relationships tested even further.

Things are not made any easier by the presence of Declan's gay friends whom he regards as "family" but whom his mother, in particular, does not like.

But for Helen it is the house, which holds unpleasant childhood reminders of her father's untimely death, that causes her to confront her troubled past.

The Blackwater Lightship is not a straightforward novel. There's no happy conclusion. By turns it is shocking and moving. Its stark, spare prose lulls the reader into a false sense of comfort, a bit like the calm before the storm, because the nub of this novel is far from pleasant. Exploring the notions of family ties and how history binds us together no matter how hard we might try to escape it, it also looks at morals, manners and the pain we can dish out with one hand and hold close with the other.

This is a quick, emotional read and one that lingers in the mind for a considerable time. It is hugely reminiscent of John McGahern's Amongst Women and Jennifer Johnston's The Gingerbread Women, two other Irish novels about troubled people coming to term with familial relationships, both written in a succinct, bleak style.