Brooklyn

I expected more from this one, and I want to be careful about how I say that, because the writing is excellent throughout.

I love Tóibín. The Magician is one of my favourite books. Brooklyn is the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the 1950s, and her inner life is imagined and rendered about as well as I have seen it done. The story just flows.

My problem is that it stays almost entirely inside her. I kept waiting for it to open out into the historical context around her, and it never really does. There is also more domestic drama than I personally want from a novel. Both of those are preferences rather than faults.

The part that got me is the loneliness of arriving somewhere:

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything.

I moved to Toronto from Istanbul when I was eighteen, and parts of this brought that back more sharply than I expected. The specific thing Tóibín catches is that the rooms you left behind are the ones where you were solid and present, and the new ones are not part of you yet. That is exactly right, and it takes longer to fix than anyone tells you.

All quotes are from Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín.