Sequels can be chancy things. Follow a character to the breathless end of their dramatic arc and you’re not always eager to meet them again. Colm Tóibín adroitly sidesteps this problem in Long Island by the simple expedient of letting time pass. We’ve been waiting 15 years to find out what happened to Eilis Lacey when she tore herself away from her home-town lover Jim Farrell in the final pages of Brooklyn and recrossed the Atlantic to her plumber husband Tony Fiorello.
As Long Island opens, in the spring of 1976, Eilis is living with Tony and their two kids in a (possibly symbolic) cul-de-sac in suburban Lindenhurst. Their street is a Fiorello enclave: Tony’s brothers and their families occupy the neighbouring houses and Eilis’s horizons are bounded by her bookkeeping job at a local garage and the rambling Sunday lunches, over which family matriarch Francesca presides.
Into this closed little world Tóibín drops an unexploded bomb. Not only has Tony impregnated one of his customers, but the woman’s husband intends to dump the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. Francesca declares her intention of raising the baby as a Fiorello, but Eilis wants nothing do with the child. With matters at a fractious stand-off, Eilis returns to Ireland, ostensibly to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday, but effectively to plot her next move.
If Brooklyn was a tale of going away, Long Island is the book of coming back. Crucially, however, Eilis is no longer the undisputed heroine. It is those she left behind – her best friend Nancy Sheridan and her old flame Jim Farrell – whose stories come to dominate Long Island. Jim Farrell has become involved with the widowed Nancy, and their tentative, self-conscious courtship – both are in their 40s – is chronicled with tenderness and tact in Tóibín’s unflustered prose.
There is a lucid simplicity to everything Tóibín writes. Nothing is forced or overstated. He trusts to the resonance of the events he narrates, the humdrum but momentous weddings and engagements, hurling games and dances, in a small provincial town. The drinkers in the pub and the shoppers in the street serve as a chorus to the action. There’s never any shortage of humour. At one point, at her daughter’s wedding, Nancy dances with the groom’s father, who “directed her around the floor, she thought, like a man driving a tractor”. And Tóibín’s eye for the Wexford landscape remains keen, not least in the obligatory beach scenes. It’s not a Tóibín novel until someone takes towel and togs – the monstrance and host of Tóibín’s fictional liturgy – and wades out for a ritualistic dip in the holy sea.
The novel sparks into life when Eilis encounters Jim on Cush Strand one afternoon. The fiction of having put his grief behind him breaks into pieces for Jim when he speaks with Eilis again. He is besotted once more. From this point on, Long Island is a small-town Irish Gatsby, with Jim desperate to repeat the past, erase the two decades of Eilis’s absence and pick up once more from where they left off.
Though Tóibín’s narrative focus is domestic, he deftly evokes the wider politics of the period, showing how the convulsions of the Troubles ripple into his characters’ routines. When Jim drives up to the city, he parks at a suburban hotel now, not in the centre, in the wake of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs.
Tóibín also understands intimately the anxieties of emigration. When Jim looks forward to a new life with Eilis in New York, his enthusiasm is tempered by a sudden gust of fear: “In Enniscorthy, his name, the same name as his father’s, was written on the outside of his building. In America, he would just be a man who had followed a woman across the Atlantic.”
The same displacement is experienced by Eilis from the other direction when she returns to Enniscorthy after 20 years. Attending mass in the cathedral, she takes her seat amid people who have lived in the town all their lives: “They did not have to explain themselves. Everyone knew who they had married, the names of their children.” If there is freedom in emigration, as Brooklyn attested, there is loss, too, a mourning for the life you might have lived. Who might you have been if you had stayed? Did you find or lose yourself when you took the boat?
These questions continue to haunt Eilis. She can’t escape the long reach of Ireland, her long history with the place, the longing it inspires. The Long Island of the title, we come to realise, is not just the splinter of land off the coast of New York: it is Ireland.
