Lingering, exquisite and subtle
Long Island by Colm Tóibín
by Lottie Fyfe
Long Island by Colm Tóibín (2024) follows the critically acclaimed Brooklyn (2009), which saw Eilis Lacey return to America and her husband Tony after an unexpected romance in her rural Irish hometown of Enniscorthy. Now, it’s the mid-seventies, Eilis is in her forties, and after twenty years of building a life together, crisis hits, as we learn that Tony has fathered a baby with another woman. Eilis now faces a decision.
Perhaps tellingly, she decides in the first instance to escape her overbearing Italian–American in-laws, and go home. An outsider in Enniscorthy now, she nevertheless finds herself immersed in her past once again: her stubbornly old- fashioned mother, one-time best friend Nancy – and old lover Jim Farrell, who, it turns out, has pined for her for most of the intervening years. There, she will consider her next move, an extraordinarily pivotal moment in a life grown seemingly mundane.
Though it stands comfortably alone as a novel, there are echoes here of its predecessor: similarly light on plot, Long Island nevertheless highlights Tóibín’s uncanny ability to express multitudes without, seemingly, saying very much at all. His prose is neat, clean and deceptively simple – spartan, almost – and yet longing, nostalgia and the turbulent, uncharted depths of human emotion sing brilliantly off the page. There are moments of wry humour in its portrait of rural Ireland, along with a cloying sense of claustrophobia, and an ever-present tension between public action and private feeling.
Deftly told from the distinct perspectives of Nancy, Jim and Eilis, the novel gathers pace towards its conclusion, as the puzzle pieces of Eilis’ indecision, Jim’s prevarication and Nancy’s sleuthing come together in a final crescendo. In the end, though, we are left with more questions than answers. But in a novel that is a masterclass in mining the confusion, ambiguity and messiness of a wholly ordinary life, perhaps this uncertainty is, in the end, entirely the point.
Lottie Fyfe is a freelance writer, editor, translator and voracious reader. After a decade working in the London publishing industry with authors including David Mitchell, Cal Flyn and Melvyn Bragg, she is currently based in East Sutherland. You can read more here
