Brookyln

My Christmas day tradition involves avoiding what my mum watches (Queen’s Speech, Call The Midwife and Downton Abbey) by reading a book. Typically, I sit down and read a comedian’s autobiography (see last week’s blog) but, not having read any fiction in a while, I decided to get my imagination on and read Brooklyn.

I’d been looking forward to reading Brooklyn off the back of Mark Kermode’s movie review.  In his appraisal he praised the film’s subtlety, commenting on how it managed to move the viewer without resorting to an X Factor score. Having missed the film at the picture house, I put the novel on the top of my Christmas wish list. Needless to say I’ve been a good boy this year and the man in the red fulfilled his end of the bargain by delivering me some prize-winning literature.

The story centres on Eilis Lacey, a young woman unable to find work in 1950s Ireland. She lives at home with her mother and sister, Rose. Brooklyn begins with Eilis admiring Rose from her bedroom window, musing on her sister’s sense of style and independence. Eilis as observer is a motif that runs throughout the novel: unable to shape her own destiny, she is passivity personified. The fact we don’t get frustrated with this wallflower owes much to Toibin’s characterisation.

Eilis is over-submissive to her fate, but her Ireland, we must remember, was a long way off from the Tiger’s roar; the economy was parochial, work was scarce. Therefore, Eilis’ acceptance to give up the home she loves for New York isn’t a show of weakness but a pragmatic solution to prospective unemployment. Moreover, Eilis as 1950’s woman was yet to enjoy the trappings of free love and feminist revolt; consequently, her inability to determine the course of her heart is more society’s failure than hers.

Eilis's small town home of Enniscorthy, Ireland.

What is most beautifully etched in the book is the immigrant experience. In today’s media migrant workers are often cast as villains, threats to the human race in a dystopian movie titled, ‘Invasion of the Job Snatchers.’ Perhaps a truer representation is Toibin’s description of people longing for home. For many of us, homesickness is a temporary state: the holidays will come and we’ll be re-united again. But for victims of poverty and war, returning mightn’t be an option; home may never be reclaimed. The realisation that home is now a foreign concept is poignantly captured by Eilis in Brookyln:

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. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty she thought.

Unanchored and adrift, she is a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into her past.

Eilis experiences the big city in Brooklyn, New York.

I should hasten to add that the book isn’t an unremitting howl for home. It has wonderful moments of humour too. You’ll struggle not to laugh at shopkeeper Miss Kelly’s less than egalitarian approach to serving customers; more at Eilis’ mother hypocrisy at welcoming visitors into her home then assassinating their characters on them leaving. Further with Eilis meeting two men – one in Brooklyn, one in Ireland – we learn that love is not always all-conquering, that separation can defeat it.

Ultimately, this is a wise, poignant book that makes you appreciate how some people, through character or circumstance, don’t have control over their lives. For those of us who do, we should be thankful and support those who don't.