Reviewed by Harriet
Many people will be familiar with Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn, or at least with the awarding-winning 2015 film adaptation. Set in 1950s Enniscorthy, County Wexford, it follows the story of Eilis Lacey who is persuaded to emigrate to New York after failing to find work in Ireland. Eilis starts to make a life for herself but decides to return home after hearing of her sister’s sudden death. Afraid of losing her, her Italian boyfriend Tony insists that they marry, something Eilis doesn’t tell her family, and when back home she starts a relationship with Jim Farrell, she doesn’t tell him either. But much as she loves Jim and would like to stay with him, someone finds out her secret and she’s forced to go back and make something of her marriage. How that would go, readers had to guess. But now, after more than twenty-five years, that guessing comes to an end, as Tóibín’s recent novel moves the story on to the 1970s.
Long Island begins with Eilis in the house she shares with her plumber husband Tony and their two teenage children. There’s a knock on the door and Eilis finds an unknown Irishman on the doorstep, demanding to know if she’s the wife of the plumber, as, having fixed everything in the house, ‘his plumbing’s so good’ that his wife is now pregnant with his child. And he makes it clear that he has no intention of bringing up ‘a plumber’s brat’. It’s clear that Tony and his close family are perfectly willing to take in the child, but Eilis is appalled, and, using the fact that her mother’s 80th birthday is fast approaching, gets on a plane and returns to Ireland. Back in Enniscorthy, she struggles at first to settle back in the life of the community, reigniting her friendship with her old friend Nancy, recently widowed, who is preparing for her daughter’s wedding. What Nancy doesn’t tell her, though, is that she’s started a secret affair with Jim Farrell, and that they are planning to marry once the wedding is out of the way. But Eilis and Jim have not forgotten the intensity of their feelings back in the 50s, and they can’t keep apart, meeting secretly at night and managing a night in a Dublin hotel.
The novel switches between the viewpoints of Eilis, in love with Jim and not wanting to go back to her cheating husband, Nancy, who wants a secure home but is anxious that she may be betraying her dead husband, and Jim, who longs to break with his rather lukewarm relationship with Nancy and stay with Eilis but can’t find the courage to tell the truth to either of the two women. So this is really a novel of secrecy and its repercussions. But the great skill and subtlety of the novel is that it’s impossible to take sides or make judgments – or it was for me, anyway. In other hands, Jim might have seemed like a despicable two-timer, but what you see of his inner life shows a real battle between his heart and his obligations and commitments. Nancy plays rather a dirty trick but you can’t really fault her reasons. As for Eilis, she takes refuge in siIence, which in the end may be her only option. Obviously I can’t say anything about the ending, but the lead up to it is as tense as any thriller, leaving you galloping through to see how all this is going to turn out.
I haven’t read enough of Tóibín and I mean to put that right – there are other Enniscorthy novels in which some of the characters from here appear, which sounds just want I need to prevent withdrawal symptoms. Meanwhile, it is to be hoped that Tóibín won’t make his readers wait another fifteen years to find out how things developed.
Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.
Colm Tóibín, Long Island (Picador, 2025). 978-1035029464, 368pp., paperback.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link – free UK P&P.
