Monthly Archives: September 2024

Conflict and inertia: Colm Tóibín, Long Island

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Colm Tóibín, Long Island (Picador, 2024). Library copy

Nothing much happens in this novel set in Colm Tóibín’s familiar Irish location of Enniscorthy. That’s not entirely true – there are significant developments, of course: a husband’s infidelity; former lovers meet again 25 years after one of them was left broken-hearted when the other returned home to Brooklyn, and both face a dilemma at the prospect of reviving that former love.

In his 2009 novel Brooklyn Eilis emigrated to America in part to escape the stifling, intrusive community of her Irish home town. In New York she married an Italian-American man, then returned to Enniscorthy for her sister’s funeral. That’s when she had to confront her dilemma: return to her (apparently) happy married life in Brooklyn after the funeral, or stay with her Irish ex-lover.

In a beautifully restrained narrative Tóibín portrayed the inner lives of these conflicted characters, struggling to cope with their opposing impulses, most of which involve heart versus head: which choice will lead to the most happiness, least pain? His focus in the novel was on what the author in an interview called ‘submerged emotions’. Characters feel deeply, they hurt inside, and they hurt others, but we rarely see this articulated, either in narrative exposition or in dialogue.

There’s a lot of dialogue, and it flows on the page with the natural ease of a river. But the important stuff is usually what isn’t said. There are a lot of silences when the characters are together.

That was the main source of Tóibín’s capacity for engaging his reader in what was such an immersive, fulfilling experience in Brooklyn. He did it again in Nora Webster (2014 – link to my post on this novel HERE); Nora pops up in Long Island as well.

He pulls this off again here. Take this example, chosen pretty much at random: One morning, having just woken up in her mother’s house in Ireland, Eilis:

…tried to think what was making her dread the day to come and then she realized that it was nothing. She was in her mother’s house, that was all.

There’s the tension between extreme opposites of emotion and experience: ‘dread’ at one end of the spectrum, and ‘nothing’ at the other. Tóibín doesn’t explain or analyse his characters’ thoughts, their submerged emotions – they remain largely unstated. We just glimpse bits of them that break the surface of the narrative, like tiny islands of solidity.

So if it worked so well in those earlier, linked novels, why is it less successful in Long Island? Tóibín said in an interview I saw on YouTube that he wouldn’t normally end a novel conclusively: he likes to leave the reader to figure out what happens to his characters after the final page. Similarly, he didn’t consider Long Island to be a sequel to Brooklyn; 25 years have passed, and his central characters have changed, developed – particularly in Eilis’s case. She’s less passive, more confident and perceptive, he said.

I can’t altogether accept that assertion. My problem with Long Island, which is as always with Tóibín a beautifully written, highly rewarding read (at one level), is that it’s too much a rerun of the earlier novel. Similar set of events leading to a similar pattern of dilemmas for the main characters.

When I’d finished I felt disappointed. I didn’t think these characters had developed much at all; the storyline was reprised and they were still stuck in the same quandary. The mix of conflict and inertia first time round was part of the unique tone of Brooklyn; this second time, it seemed to me just frustrating.

I wouldn’t advise readers who enjoyed Brooklyn to give Long Island a miss, however. Even a slightly less successful novel by Colm Tóibín is still better than most contemporary fiction.

Secrets, guilt and redemption: recent reading

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Work projects and an enjoyable river cruise in Germany have filled my time in recent weeks, so this is another brief roundup of recent reading. All four novels were passed on to me by Mrs TD.

They all deal with the way the second world war (or other traumatic experiences) blighted the lives of those who survived. All of the central characters found ways to blur their vision of what had happened, and how their lives continued. This involved keeping secrets – and that doesn’t always work out well for us, does it?

Ian McEwan, Lessons (Vintage, 2023, first published 2022).

The secret that Roland keeps involves a transgressive relationship in his youth. He replicates the flaws in his parents’ relationship in his own marriage, and has to cope with the consequences. I struggled to engage with this at first, but gradually came to relish the force of the narrative. It has some of the slow-burning passion of the great 19C Russian novelists, but is of course very much of its own time.

Josie Ferguson, The Silence in Between (Doubleday, 2024)

This is the heartbreaking story of the terrible impact of the Russian occupation of Berlin towards the end of WWII, and then of the sudden construction in 1961 of the wall that divided the city. A mother is separated from her sick baby when the barriers go up, and her teenage daughter resolves to get her little brother back from the other side of the wall in the hope that this will redeem her in her mother’s eyes. The girl can’t understand why her mother can’t seem to love her. The reasons are revealed when the backstory is given – it’s a gut-wrenching, moving story.

William Boyd, The Blue Afternoon (Penguin, 2019, first published 1993)

There was too much plot and intrusive researched detail in this otherwise entertaining novel. It starts with a talented woman architect in art deco Los Angeles in 1936, cheated by her crooked partner and starting out in her own business. A mysterious older man shows up claiming to be a lost part of her past. For reasons she doesn’t entirely understand (I didn’t either) she follows him in a quest to find a long-lost lover that takes him first to New Mexico, then to Lisbon. Much of the novel takes the form of this man’s history from 1903 in Manila, where he’d been a pioneering surgeon. There are numerous plot twists in what develops into a steamy murder mystery. All this doesn’t quite gel with the romantic plot line involving his affair with a married woman (he’s also married). It’s another entertaining holiday read in Boyd’s sub-Greene mode – but ultimately not so great.

Yael van der Wouden, The Safe Keep (Viking, 2024)

There’s a fine review of this over at the Lonesome Reader (link HERE), with an excellent spoiler-free plot summary (not an easy feat with a novel that has such a huge plot twist two thirds through). Like The Silence in Between and The Cut Out Girl (a novel by Bart van Es, which I posted on in Dec. last year – link HERE), it deals with events in the German-occupied Netherlands, and the ways that the rest of the population accommodated themselves to what ensued. It makes for another uncomfortable, moving read, raising questions about guilt, cowardice and complicity in crime – but there’s also some element of redemption and healing love. Although it’s not too difficult to figure out fairly early on what’s going on beneath the surface of the first part of the novel, it doesn’t entirely rely on the mystery aspect of the story. As Eric says in his review, it’s difficult to sympathise fully with Isabel, the spiky character at the heart of the narrative; as in Boyd’s novel, the characterisation isn’t entirely convincing. But its sustained by its tense and shocking background story, and by its clear-eyed depiction of ordinary people looking the other way when terrible things happened.