Book review: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don’t think Colm Tóibín has ever misstepped; I don’t think it’s possible for him to misstep. Brooklyn, one of his shorter novels, is narrated in an almost deceptively simple and straightforward way, beautifully rendering the time period – Ireland and New York in the 1950s – through a young woman’s coming-of-age tale. Like medicine mixed in with honey, it seduces you into caring for the characters and their fate before you reach the plot twist’s bitter tang.

The novel’s main theme is the impossibility of fully expressing or understanding love. Eilis, the protagonist, is a young woman who lives in a small Irish town with her mom and glamorous older sister Rose. Her father passed away and her brothers immigrated to Birmingham for work. Religion rules, nobody can misbehave, and a well-suited marriage is the ultimate goal – love in Ireland is about life betterment. Young women’s two main worries are when they’ll get married and what sort of work they’ll do until then. A family’s name and reputation is everything.

Eilis is sent across the sea to Brooklyn for her own betterment, to live in a boarding house for working-class Irish women, not too far from the local parish or her job as a sales assistant at a department store. The first half of the novel is about Eilis doing everything others think is best for her, and the possibilities of love in the land of opportunities. In the second half, she grows into a woman who feels more in charge of her destiny, even briefly returning home as a sort of “prodigal daughter”. The novel’s main tension comes from Eilis’ realisation that she actually has very little choice in life and love – that women may be more independent than they were in the past but they are still tied to the morality of their backgrounds and limited by the narrow options available to them.

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