He quite liked it,but the problem with the Met production lay in what was missing. When he was 15 and at home in Enniscorthy,the Irish writer first listened to a record featuring the singing of Joan Sutherland and things have never been the same since.
Colm Toibin says the image that inspired his sequel to Brooklyn didn’t get into the final manuscript.Getty
“There are a few arias in my life that have been taken over by Joan Sutherland,” he says,“and no matter who sings those songs,now I want Joan Sutherland.”
I have encountered Toibin several times over the years. We have talked aboutThe Heather Blazing,, and others of his many books,but I never expected to be discussing a sequel to his much loved novelBrooklyn 15 years after it came out.
told the story of Eilis Lacey who emigrates from ’50s Ireland to New York. There she falls in love with Tony Fiorello,whom she secretly marries shortly before returning home because of the death of her sister. Back in Ireland,she begins a romance with the son of the local publican,Jim Farrell,that causes her to question her stateside commitments.
Supplied
Long Island is set 20 years later. Eilis and Tony now have two children,Larry and Rosella,and are living on the eponymous island where Tony had long aspired to a home. As the book opens,an irate Irishman knocks on the door to tell Eilis that Tony has made his wife pregnant and when the baby arrives he will be dumping it on her. This prompts her to go back for the first time since the events ofBrooklyn to Enniscorthy where she will again encounter Jim,now running the pub,who has been in a discreet relationship with Eilis’ old friend Nancy,now widowed.
Toibin maintains he had never intended to return to Eilis. “That would end in tying up knots that you emphatically hadn’t done in the first novel,” he says. “The pact you make with a reader as a novelist is that you ask the reader to keep imagining the rooms,the faces,the atmosphere,and then you ask the reader to imagine the sort of post-novel.”
It wasn’t as if he had a great novel rattling around his head and decided because of some ethical sense not to write it.
Yet ... he did have an image 20 years later of Eilis’ brother walking on a beach with two tall teenagers with dark eyes and hair who didn’t look Irish. “And someone stopped to say,‘oh my,who are they?’ ‘Oh,they’re Eilis’.’ And someone just says in that very Wexford way,‘are they?’ with all the meaning.”
In writing the book,however,that image didn’t get in. “Henry James says,have a dream,lose a reader,but once I got the opening,it was a new book,a different book rather than taking up where I left off.”
Some writers whose work has been successfully adapted for the screen often see their characters as the actors who played them. John le Carre,for example,could see only Alec Guinness when he wrote more about George Smiley. That wasn’t the case with Toibin when he returned to Eilis;as a character she was so fixed for him. And anyway,“Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal was so particular”.
Saoirse Ronan as Eilis in the film adaptation of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn.Supplied
The performance that did “matter enormously” to him was Domhnall Gleeson as Jim. It’s hard to play a quiet,thoughtful man,he says,and “who’s ever written a quiet,thoughtful Irishman for the screen?”
Toibin says:“The feeling about Jim is that his feelings are deep,that he’s very controlled. I was really fascinated by it because it was a performance of something new and I found that very helpful.” That fed into the characterisation of Jim,which is appropriate asLong Island is a novel about the secrets kept by various people.
The other challenge for Toibin was to do something with Eilis’ mother as the events in Brooklyn had affected her significantly.
“The pact was broken in that world where it is agreed that one daughter will stay with the widowed mother. And when that doesn’t happen there’s shame;she feels that shame going out into the street. And over the 20 or whatever number of years,this eats at her – the solitude,the shame and her dead daughter,her dead husband,and sons in England,and her daughter,who seems to have fled and left behind a sort of chaos.”
But the interest in the idea of homecoming is still there,particularly from America,a country that seemed so glamorous. “Except,” Toibin points out,“to the person coming from America.”
Nancy feels she has to wear smarter clothes after seeing Eilis,and Jim says Eilis seems to have a quality of “ease and confidence”,all apparently through having been in America. “And Eilis doesn’t feel any of this. It isn’t as though she’s walking through the town as a proud American. She always has an effect on people without trying to have that effect. And so she’s almost passive.”
Toibin knows about life in the US. He teaches a regular semester at Columbia University in New York,and his boyfriend of many years lives in Los Angeles. But he still has his house by the sea in Cush. “I spend as much time in LA as I can,and then as much time in Ireland as I can.”
So like Eilis he is familiar with the experience of moving into someone else’s world where you don’t know anyone and no one knows you. InLong Island,Tony’s father cannot pronounce Eilis’ name. It’s an experience Toibin is familiar with:“It’s absolutely out of my life. They just can’t do it;they won’t do it,and they don’t even try.”
What’s lovely about Toibin’s novels set around the area where he comes from –The Heather Blazing,The Blackwater Lightship,Brooklyn,Nora Webster and nowLong Island – is the way they talk to each other through characters and places reappearing,even if only briefly. In the new novel Eilis looks for directions to her brother Martin’s house and walks past “the judge’s house”,a reference back to Eamon Redmond fromThe Heather Blazing;inBrooklyn,Nancy spots Nora Webster in Enniscorthy and Martin bought Nora’s house after her husband died,while Lily Devereux fromThe Blackwater Lightship also pops up along the way.
“This is building up – if you take all the other novels out – to being not just a picture of a society,but a sort of fictional space that gets slightly bigger and more extended each time. I don’t know why there’s so much pleasure attached to just inserting the name of the characters. There is an emotion around it that anchors something. It suggests this world you’re describing is closer to real than imaginary.”
So the question remains,are we going to return to the characters of Eilis and Jim in,perhaps,another 15 years? Toibin thinks he’s got as much as he can out of Jim. “If you tried to dramatise his emotional life a second time it really would be like you’re sort of jumping on your own bandwagon.”
And Eilis? “She’s still there. But generally,in a trilogy,the last one is awful.”
Long Island is published by Picador at $34.99.
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