Tóibín's cunning use of our expectations continues when Eilis gets bad news from home, and returns to Enniscorthy for a few weeks.
In a particularly daring departure, he remains a completely decent and kind man. Meanwhile, any readers of Irish fiction who might reasonably assume Father Flood's motives must have their sinister side are in for a shock. Eilis's boss makes a sudden lesbian advance, which is neither developed nor mentioned again. She has no great enthusiasm for the idea but, with what turns out to be characteristic passivity, she goes along with it anyway.Īt times, Tóibí*seems to be teasing us with the promise of more traditionally dramatic incident. She does, however, need work herself – which is why Rose puts in a word with Father Flood, who's back visiting Ireland and who soon sorts out a job and a place to live for Eilis in his Brooklyn parish. Eilis shows no signs of resenting these restrictions. Not only does everybody know everybody else, they're also aware of everybody's place in the town's intricate social hierarchy. The Lacey sons have all gone to England for work, leaving Eilis with the sort of small-town Irish life familiar from many other novels – including Tóibín's. When Brooklyn begins, in the early 1950s, Eilis is living with her more glamorous sister Rose and their widowed mother. And, like several Tóibí*protagonists before her, Eilis Lacey comes from his own home town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford. His prose, always determinedly unshowy, is here distilled into its purest form yet, and so is his long-running theme of people's inability to make sense of their lives. In fact, what proves far more influential is the previous fiction of Colm Tóibín. Given that Colm Tóibín's last novel, the Booker-shortlisted The Master, was about Henry James, it's tempting to try to detect some Jamesian influences at work in Brooklyn – especially as the main character is a young woman travelling between Europe and America.
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