Book: Long Island
Author: Colm Tóibín
Price: Rs 750
Published by: Picador
Long Island is a sequel to Colm Tóibín’s well-known 2009 novel, Brooklyn, and features the same characters and some of the same settings although Tóibín himself, in a promotional interview, refused to think of the novel as a sequel and called it a different story with the same characters. Tóibín’s assessment of his new book is accurate so far as there is no need to read Brooklyn to enjoy his latest offering. Eilis Lacey, the protagonist of both the novels, is now more than twenty years older, married to Tony Fierello, with two children at the cusp of adulthood. The more passive and self-effacing young woman of the previous novel has now been replaced by a much older woman, more assertive and able to take decisions that require lots of courage. An unexpected crisis comes to shake the very foundation of the marriage between Eilis and Tony and to resolve the same, Eilis decides to visit her maternal home in Enniscorthy in Wexford, Ireland. There is, however, another reason for this visit: her mother is turning eighty and Eilis wants to visit her as she has not met her for an inordinately long time. Returning to her hometown after more than a gap of twenty years makes Eilis an object of curiosity and gossip. Both an outsider and an insider at Enniscorthy, all her former acquaintances see her as someone seeped in a kind of American glamour and insist on calling her by her maiden name — Eilis Lacey. Enniscorthy is also the hometown of Tóibín; he thus succeeds in recreating the atmosphere of a small Irish town where everyone knows everyone else and has been neighbours for decades in vivid detail.
Eilis’s return to her hometown starts a train of events the roots of which go back to her previous visit. Divided into seven parts, the novel takes us back and forth between the present and the past following the memories of the three most important characters — Eilis, Jim Farrell, and Nancy Sheridan. The dynamics of relationships that had once existed among them have changed and, now, they take on a different colour. Eilis’s short-lived affair with Jim when she had visited the town after the death of her sister comes back to haunt them all as well. Moreover, Jim has been secretly seeing Nancy for some time now even though he has never been able to get over his love for Eilis. The complicated situation in Long Island, where members of the Fierello family live close to one another and cling to one another with a fierce yet suffocating loyalty, is very similar to the ambience of Enniscorthy where people still remember Eilis’s betrayal of Jim more than two decades ago.
The novel, in its fast-paced, crisp, almost spare, prose, takes the readers into the minds of Eilis, Nancy, and Jim by turn and provides them with motivations and reasons for their actions. It also subtly, almost imperceptibly, raises questions about morality and ethics and poses certain ethical conundrums that the readers are surreptitiously called upon to unravel because the narrative refuses to provide an answer either way. Brooklyn had ended with a decisive action on the part of Eilis which eventually shaped much of the course of the narrative of Long Island. But the latter provides the readers only with an ending, not a closure. The questions that the narrative has raised hang in the balance and it ends on a note of uncertainty. It is up to the readers to tease out the implications of the actions of the characters; similarly, it is up to them to imagine what will or might happen after the moment the novel ends. It is an exercise not only of the imagination of the novelist but also that of the readers.
Long Island, with a masterfully crafted narrative, is intriguing, almost taking on, at times, the colours of a whodunnit. It is a pleasure to read. The “Long Island” of the title is both the island in New York as well as the island of longing around which humans revolve in their currents and eddies; it is both New York and Ireland, literally and metaphorically. All these subtle themes and suggestions have been finely woven into a wonderfully readable novel by Tóibín.
