So much did I enjoy Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009) that I took the rare step of pre-ordering the hardback of its sequel, slightly discounted from Amazon, to arrive on its publication day last week. 

I remember being disappointed by the film Broolyn‘s ending, feeling it wasn’t quite faithful to the book. Once I started reading its sequel, I thought I should have reread it as, fifteen years on, my memory of exactly what happened and how it ended was a little vague. However, I remembered enough and was soon caught up in Eilis Fiorello’s (née Lacey) story once again.

Twenty years on from Brooklyn (and now the 1970s), Eilis is living with her husband Tony and their two teenage children, Larry and Rosella in Long Island. It’s no spoiler to tell you that right at the beginning of the story, a man appears on Eilis’s doorstep to tell her that his wife is expecting Tony’s child and there is no way he will allow it to live in his house, so he will bring it to her. Tony is a plumber and has been having an affair with one of his clients.

How Eilis handles and processes this devastating shock, is the focus of the book. We see a more confident, independent Eilis than in Brooklyn, but a woman suffocated by her husband’s Italian family who all live close together and treat her as an outsider, despite her really being no more of an outsider in New York than them. It’s 20 years since she left Ireland and she considers herself American.

Eilis doesn’t confront Tony immediately and there is a kind of uncomfortable ‘dance’ between them as their life goes on ‘as normal’, and even when Tony knows Eilis has been told what’s happened, they don’t really talk about it in any depth. All Eilis says is that she will not have the baby in the house and she doesn’t want her mother-in-law – who lives opposite – to take the baby in (Francesca has said she will). Eilis says and asks surprisingly little, and never seems to question whether she’ll stay with Tony. I found it a little frustrating.

Finally, she decides to go back to Ireland, her hometown of Enniscorthy, for a while, both for distance to think and decide what she wants to do, and to join in the celebrations of her mother’s 80th birthday. It’s the first time she’s returned in 20 years and her children will join her a couple of weeks later, meeting their Irish grandmother and family for the first time.

Eilis’s mother gives her a spiky reception. She’s never acknowledged the photos Eilis has sent over the years of her children; she criticises her Americanisms. Nancy, Eilis’s former best friend has mixed feelings. She’s pleased Eilis will be home for the wedding of one of her daughters, but wary as she’s secretly having an affair with Jim Farrell, who runs the local pub, and they plan to announce their engagement after her daughter’s wedding.

Famously in the town, when Eilis returned home twenty years before, she and Jim had an affair that everyone expected to end in marriage. What no one knew was that Eilis was already married to Tony. When she returned to New York, she left Jim not knowing why she’d suddenly left, although he soon learned through gossip that she was already married. He has not forgotten her and he’s never married. But he’s lonely, and Nancy – a widow – promises to rescue him from the loneliness of middle age. 

Eilis’s return to Enniscorthy brings inevitable confusions and jealousies and uncertainties. How will it all play out? Eilis and Jim discover they still love each other but will Eilis stay or return to New York? She has not only herself to think of, but her children. And what of Nancy who is secretly planning her wedding to Jim, who says nothing to halt her when he starts secretly meeting up with Eilis?

I was quickly caught up in Tóibín’s writing again: his stylish prose that reads so beautifully; his apparently easy understanding of relationships and how people think. Yet, as the novel went on, I became a little frustrated. I had to remind myself it is set in the 1970s when leaving a husband and children, divorcing, even when the husband has made another woman pregnant, was not so common or easy. 

I felt there was a weakness in the characters, not just Tony who is a rather pathetic man, but Eilis and Jim seemingly unwilling to commit to a decision. And the end was amazingly abrupt and frustrating. It’s clear there will be a part three to this series and I guess I will want to read it, but I have to say that Long Island was in the end a bit of a disappointing sequel for me – although it’s been collecting many wonderful reviews, describing it as a masterpiece.