Home is where the heart is

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín’s Brook- lyn is a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed.

The tale’s simplicity is, in a sense, like life’s: an Irish girl called Eilis can’t find good work in her home town of Enniscorthy, so she goes along with a well-intended family conspiracy to send her to a decent job in Brooklyn. It is the early 1950s. Her father is dead.

In Brooklyn, she finds her feet and falls in love. But when her older sister dies, she must return to Enniscorthy. Her Italian-American boyfriend fears that she will not return, and persuades her to marry him. His premonition is spot-on. The return throws Eilis into confusion. Her mother is now alone. She has an Irish suitor. Home is home. Brooklyn seems a long way away. Will she return? Won’t she? I have said too much already. But if the ingredients sound unremarkable, everything about the telling — the pacing, the lucidity, the balance between compassion and restraint — is consummate.

This is a story that has no villains. In fact, the amount of kindness, respect and even love Eilis inspires, without seeming to do anything special to deserve it, is touching. She is simply a good and intelligent person, and we, like those who come into contact with her, can’t seem to help having her best interests at heart. Eilis is perceptive. She is good at sensing motives, even in alien circumstances. And she is firm in her sense of herself, her autonomy, her capabilities and limits. But she is also malleable.