Long Island by Colm Toibin

 

Long Island by Colm Toibin

published 2024

 

 

This is the sequel to his Brooklyn, a book that had two posts on the blog:

Dress Down Sunday: Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Dress Down Sunday: Sales and stockings

back in 2015. I was astonished, by the way, to see that Brooklyn came out in 2009, I assumed it was much more recent than that. Toibin certainly gave it some space before the followup…

The book gets going fast: Eilish has been married many years to Tony, they have two children, and live on Long Island. It is one traditional extended family: their house is in a cul-de-sac where the other houses belong to his parents and siblings.

One day a man turns up to talk to Eilis. His wife has been having an affair with Tony, she is pregnant, and the wronged husband intends to dump the baby on their doorstep when it is born. This is p4: setup complete.

Eilis is furious, says she will never accept the baby. She is even more furious when she realizes that the Italian family, while not impressed with Tony’s behaviour, are shrugging their shoulders and ready to go along with this. What is another baby? He or she will be part of their family.

There is a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing with the family, and finding out who knows what, including this splendid moment:

Later, as she worked in the kitchen, Tony came and joined her. ‘Was my mother here today?’

‘Oh yes, she was,’ Eilis said. ‘It was lovely to see her.’

‘I think she was worried about you.’

‘We had a nice talk.’

‘So there is no problem?’ The idea that she was standing beside a drawer of knives gave Eilis pause for thought.

Eilis decides to put some distance from the situation, and go back to Ireland for the summer, using her mother’s 80^th birthday as an excuse – though Eilis tends not to need an excuse for anything she does. She hasn’t been back in many years to Enniscorthy, the town in county Wexford where she grew up.

It is never stated directly what the date is, but you would guess early 1970s.

Fifty pages in and we are in Ireland, and meeting again Nancy, Eilis’s great friend from years ago, and Jim, the man she almost stayed in Ireland to be with. Back then, ‘They were not just four friends; they were two couples’.

Unlike the first book, the POV changes, and gives us life through Jim and Nancy’s eyes as well as Eilis. Jim and Nancy are what the Irish call ‘doing a line’ – Nancy has been widowed, Jim never married. (This has echoes of a similar plotline in recently-featured A Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor). They would seem to suit, both of them are keen on the idea.

Well, you don’t have to be Miss Marple to see where this is going. The plot lays itself out before you. Eilis is going to waltz in and upset everyone’s lives, just as she did before, while leaving her other trail of trouble in New York state.

The next few weeks play out with events (a wedding, the birthday) and outings and activities. Eilis’s children, all-American kids, join them for a bit of most enjoyable cultural comparison.

The events are very well-described, as is the gossip-y nature of the town. Everything moves in a leisurely way to a climax. When will Nancy realize what is going on? What will be the outcome, who will end up where? Can Eilis forgive Tony and go home – and what about her poor children?

I will say that in the last tranche of pages the readers is dying to find out, and it isn’t at all clear how it is going to pan out.

The ending could be seen as ambiguous, though in my mind it was clear what would happen next. And I thought there was a bit of a cheat in a way that Eilis’s life is going to made easier. I will say, this is a great choice for a bookgroup, because everyone gets caught up in it, and people surprise each other with their take on it: if they object to the ending, what they think will happen. And – and this is the big one – where their sympathies lie. Lots of surprises there, you might find.

It is a very good read. The area in Ireland where it is mostly set is one I know well, as some of my own family came from there. Their homeplace is even mentioned: ‘I stopped in The Ballagh,’ Eilis said, ‘and bought something I might cook, a sort of breakfast.’ That certainly added to the interest for me, but I think anyone can enjoy the picture of rural Ireland.

It is unlike the first book, which, as mentioned above, was wholly in Eilis’s head, and also was extremely linear: one thing happened, and then the next. There weren’t flashbacks and memories and re-arranging of events. This book was the opposite: that annoying thing with a chapter ending ‘how did you know I was here?’ and then the next one giving the answer, starting with his getting up that morning. (It may be just me, but I find this intensely irritating, and in this case it is clear that Colm Toibin is perfectly capable of doing it in my preferred way.)

I remember also his saying that he liked in Jane Austen the way girls were planning and preparing for parties and balls. And he does an excellent number on this (both books) – I like the way he takes his time to discuss this, and of course Clothes in Books takes it seriously too.

And then at the event we might get this:

Nancy danced with Matt’s father who directed her around the floor, she thought, like a man driving a tractor.

-along with a lot of watching and taking note and seeing how everyone gets home, and who with.

I also liked the description of a church service:

she noticed her mother making a sign to Jack at the end of the pew. He stood up and the entire family walked up the aisle to the altar, Eilis’s mother flanked by Rosella and Dominick. It was not the waiting that mattered, Eilis saw, or the kneeling at the altar rails to take the host. It was the turning and the walking back, the large congregation all watching them – Mrs Lacey, her sons, her daughter, her grandchildren all home for her eightieth birthday. Eilis realized that her mother had planned this moment, knowing the right time to step out into the aisle and how to walk back to her place as though no one was looking at her.

(Interestingly, there is a similar scene in a John McGahern book I read recently, also set in Ireland. Post to come later.)

Eilis is an intriguing heroine: she is quite affectless and passive, while staying stubborn and unmoving. You don’t warm to her at all, while quite admiring her entrenched views, but also every now and then the reader says ‘no don’t do that’ to her. The very prickly relationship with her mother is well done – based on misunderstandings and miscommunication, it is heart-breaking and touching.

 

Clothes are an issue. Here Nancy is contemplating a dress worn by Eilis:

The pale yellow colour was new to her, but the strangest part of it was the waist, how the waist was held in by a belt in the same cotton and the same colour.

Toibin pays attention, as mentioned above, but doesn’t describe much, and I’m not wholly sure what these young women are wearing. I am worried by Nancy not seeming familiar with the idea of what my mother (a great fashion expert with deep Irish roots) was certainly calling a ‘self-belt’ long before the time of the book, it seems unlikely it didn’t exist in Ireland? It is true that clothes were (in those days) very different in different countries, and would look slightly out of place, for better or worse, if they’ve travelled. The days of The Gap were yet to come.

I have just picked some illos from 1970s fashion magazines…

With the previous book, I actually found the film better than the book, and can now only see Saoirse Ronan as Eilis with her cool passive face. We can hope there will be another film.

There is another book by this author on the blog:

House of Names by Colm Toibin

-       Set in classical times and quite splendid.