I have been reading Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. It is set in the mid nineteen fifties in southern Ireland and in Brooklyn. The story is the story of Irish emigration, at a time when the economy is stagnant and jobs difficult to find. Eilis Lacey’s brothers are in Birmingham in England. Her sister, Rose, does have a good job, but Eilis can only find a Sunday job in a local shop.

Her emigration to Brooklyn, where opportunities are better, is mediated though her sister Rose and the brief return of an Irish priest from Brooklyn. Father Flood organises her employment with Bartocci’s in Brooklyn which enables her to get immigration papers. Her sister has one of the few good jobs around, but by sending her sister away, she is condemning herself to remaining close to their mother and giving up chances to marry.

The story is organised into 4 parts. In the first, the setting in county Wexford is established and the voyage by ocean liner documented. The second and third parts are set in Brooklyn, the first portraying a very narrow and hard existence, the second opening up as she meets Tony Fiorello at a dance at the parish hall. She meets his family, learns his aspirations to open a business and move out to Long island. There and set pieces at Coney Island and Ebbet’s Field, where she watches a Dodgers game. But Rose has a weak heart and dies and Eilis must return home, but first secretly marries Tony in a civil ceremony.

In the part the symmetry is completed as we return to the same small corner of county Wexford, but Eilis has changed and her station in life is different. She helps out at the factory and is swiftly offered an office job. Jim Farrell, who snubbed her at the dance before she left, now gets himself included in the party she makes with her friends Nancy and George, and she is drawn to him. But the news of her marriage reaches Ireland via telephone, and she has to leave.

The novel is written in the third person but is close enough to a first person narrative. Every scene follows Eilis and everything is told from her point of view; but the style is indirect, and often the narration as Eilis thinks about what she is encountering and what she might do. On her return, Brooklyn disappears rapidly. We are told she responds, tardily, to Tony’s letters, but nothing about their contents or what she wrote in her letters back.

There are no great dramas. Her professor of law and evening class lost his entire family in the concentration camps, which she learns from a bookseller in Manhattan. Bartocci’s starts serving black women and Eilis is given the job of making sure they are properly welcomed as customers. But the persecution of Jews and racial segregation are historical background.

The style is measured. After Tony stays over, her landlady locks the grill preventing her private access to her rooms. Sometime later, she relents, and removes the lock, citing sufficient security. The erotic incident with her boss, Miss Fortini, seems to have no further consequences. But each incident builds her experience. There is no need to over-dramatise, the drama of the situation is sufficient. Eilis is a still character. Not doing something, but thinking that something might have been done, but wasn’t, allows Tóibín to create a denser fabric.

 

Brooklyn probably qualifies as an historical novel and so does Anuradha Roy’s novel An Atlas of Impossible Longing, which is set in Bengal between 1927 and 1957. That the two novels came up in sequence in the book group reading list is a coincidence, but they are somewhat similar. They are roughly of equal length at just over 300 pages; I guess 100,000 words; and are set at roughly the same time, although Roy’s novel starts further back in the past. In both, economic and political conditions are not just a static background, but provide a shifting context which shapes the lives of the principal characters. In both Irish and Indian society, the characters struggle to escape their station in life.

Roy’s novel is in three parts, the first telling the story of Amulya, who moves to Songarh in 1907 in search of quiet, causing his wife Kananbala misery. The second part focuses on the next generation, particularly their son Nirmal, and the third part then covers the third generation, the generation of Nirmal’s daughter Bakul and the orphan Mukunda whom Amulya supported at an orphanage and Nirmal bought home to live with the family, only to send him away again to Calcutta.

During this period, the British leave and India gains its independence. But the cost is partition and partition drives the final segments of the story. Mukunda moves in with a Moslem family, who flee to East Pakistan, while Hindu families take refuge in the opposite direction. These migrations open the way to unscrupulous property developers like Aangti, for whom Mukunda works, to buy up old properties for sale or redevelopment.

It is through the properties, the house Mukunda is left to guard, Bakul’s family home in Manoharpur and Mukunda’s former home in Songarh that the threads are bought together again.

I found the first two parts of the novel quite slow, particularly the first, which often reflects Kananbala’s point of view: isolated, lonely, ignored. It is only as the novel progresses, that the richer narrative starts to take shape. The destinies of the previous two generations have largely been stories of confinement and defeat, and although for Bakul and Mukunda perhaps the impossible may be possible, we can’t be sure how secure their situation is at the end of the novel.

The narrative switches from the third person in the first two parts to Mukunda’s first person narrative in the third part. I wasn’t really sure why, but one effect is that while Mukunda treats his wife quite badly, we see events only from his point of view, and this isn’t emphasised. Although it is largely the actions or inactions of the men that are, for the most part, the immediate cause; the dreams of both the men and women are thwarted, and it is clear that it is caste, religion and the status of women in India that often lies behind these particular cruelties.