Long Island
Colm Toibin, Picador, £20
 

THIS is a gorgeous summer read, a subtly crafted love story by the masterful Colm Toibin. For book fetishists the hardback version is a covetable object in itself, with its elegant jade and coral covers.

Colm Toibin is one of Ireland’s most successful writers. His bestseller Brooklyn established him as a global author, amplified by the release of a Hollywood movie version of the same title. 20 years on, Long Island resumes the story of Eilis, the girl who emigrated to Brooklyn in the cause of duty, leaving behind her one great love. 

In order to enjoy Long Island you don’t need to have read the prequel, but you can find fascinating threads holding between these two books; the reading of both gives a richer sense of some of the characters and their motivations.

In the new novel the theme of migration to America, so foundational to 20th-century Irish and American societies, is explored again to probe the longer term effects on those who leave and those who remain. In this sense the title, Long Island, has deeper significance, suggesting the pull of connection across the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, Long Island, the New York location, features less prominently in the novel than another place, the small town on the east coast of Ireland, Enniscorthy. 

The novel’s shift of focus to small town Ireland with its marketplace and high street of squinting windows allows romantic love to flicker again. More than that, it presents a background of community, one that is tightly conformed by old-world mores; it offers time travel for Eilis to a 1950s milieu, with the odd glimpse of modernity coming through.

The novel opens with an annunciation of sorts when a man knocks at Eilis’s door and tells her that Tony, her husband, has impregnated the stranger’s wife. This news disrupts a comfortable if stifling marriage which Eilis has been living in the family-built utopia, a cul de sac on the island.

Toibin’s writing mirrors the depiction of a more formal society through the conventions of its style and syntax. This is a novel about restraint, embodied in the writing itself. Sex is told not “shown,” so to speak: “And in the parked car at the end of each night she had responded to him in ways that were unmistakable.” There will be no bad sex award for this book, I can assure you.

Instead, the writing builds characters out of the daily activities described: a woman working in a chip shop, a wedding being planned, family visits. In this sense the work is reminiscent of Sally Rooney’s foregrounding of ordinary rituals in Normal People; added together these rituals depict the dignity of human life. 

In Long Island, Toibin goes further. We watch characters make small polite steps in an almost affectless state, as in a parlour dance. The characters are inscrutable to each other, as one must be in such a strait-jacketed collective. The only sense of the depth of emotion being hidden comes when a character is suddenly triggered into expressive action, like a flamenco solo erupting on the end of a minuet.

Two thirds of the book plots towards a less than scintillating tryst: “Let me be clear. You would go to Dublin in your car. I would go in mine. We would meet in the hotel. Just one room. For the night. Is that right?” Eilis seeks clarity from an Irish bachelor – Irish sex always risks the danger of Father Ted association. 

The novel’s last section then moves into inevitable denouement; it is deft, beautiful, and almost classical in the elegance of its mechanism. 

Ultimately the spectre of a baby haunts the book. It’s an interesting displacement of the Irish legacy of shame around the Magdalene Laundries, the mother and baby homes. A wife not wanting another woman’s baby coming into her house was often at the root of the exclusion of young mothers. In this story, Eilis has herself been the excluded one, in that she has had to exile herself from her own life. 

Toibin is excellent in showing the particular pressures society levels on women, the kinds of double binds they find themselves tied into, and their shrewd manipulations in order to open out their future prospects. 

Widows abound in this book. Like veteran soldiers, their experience of loss and grief confers respectability on them; the honorific “Mrs” sanctions their independence, and nullifies the Oedipal urge. Long Island builds to a coda in which the community becomes the device by which order may be restored. The institution of marriage, like a useful ally, provides an ironic coup de grace. In the village of squinting windows a sly joke has been laid in the use one widow puts to her Windolene. 

The cultural critic Fredric Jameson has written of how in a globalised art field, real estate becomes the only theme. This is an interesting idea in relation to this novel; throughout this work buildings, and their capacity to house lives but also to earn revenue, is a key trope. 

But ultimately, the vital source of meaning in this novel of restraint and resignation, respectability, and decency undone by desire, comes from the collective: in Long Island the writer’s craft elevates the craftiness of the small town petit bourgeoisie.