Brooklyn

Every day she had come back to this small room in this house full of sounds and gone over everything new that had happened. Now, all that seemed like nothing compared to the picture she had of home, of her own room, the house in Friary Street, the food she had eaten there, the clothes she wore, how quiet everything was. 

Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn is a subtle and deeply ironic portrait of Irish emigration – a somewhat inescapable subject for an Irish writer. In the novel, set in the early 1950s, Eilis (pronounced “Eyelish”) is the youngest daughter of Mary Lacey, a widow living in a town in southeast Ireland called Enniscorthy. Eilis's two brothers have jobs in Liverpool. Her sister, Rose, works in an office and, through a priest named Father Flood, arranges for Eilis to go to America to work. Eilis doesn’t want to go to America, but silently complies. Of course, Eilis’s amenability, her willingness to simply go along with other people’s plans, soon emerges as a character flaw in her. 

On board the ship bound for New York, Eilis meets her third class cabin-mate, Georgina, a glamorous-looking woman who puts Eilis in her place – the top bunk. Georgina is returning to America after visiting family in Liverpool. 

“Never again,” Georgina said. “Never again.” 

Eilis could not resist. “Never again such a big trunk or never again going to America?” 

“Never again in third class. Never again the trunk. Never again going home to Liverpool. Just never again. Does that answer your question?” 

Once in Brooklyn, Eilis is boarded in a house owned by a Mrs. Kehoe, along with four other young Irish women. She has a job as a salesgirl on the floor of a department store called Bartocci’s. She settles nicely into her routine until the first letter from Rose arrives and fills her with such overwhelming homesickness that Miss Fortini, Eilis’s store supervisor, calls in Father Flood to help. To occupy her mind, he gets her enrolled in night classes at Brooklyn College. 

On Friday nights, Eilis goes with two of her boarding housemates to a dance organized by Father Flood. It is there that she meets Tony Fiorello, a plumber who lives in Brooklyn with his parents and three brothers. They begin dating, going out to eat, to the movies, to a baseball game, even to Coney Island. Miss Fortini helps Eilis acquire a becoming swimsuit, and takes a few liberties in the changing room that leave Eilis unsettled. 

Then, suddenly, word comes from Ireland of Rose’s sudden death. Eilis decides to go home, but not before Tony gets her to marry him in a civil ceremony. Telling no one of her marriage, Eilis goes home and, despite the absence of Rose, Enniscorthy seems exactly as she left it. She, however, has been transformed into a glamorous figure, with colorful, stylish clothes and makeup. Her friend Nancy is getting married and pushes Eilis at Jim Farrell, whose family runs a local pub. Eilis postpones her return to America, and even takes over Rose’s old office job. She goes to the seaside with Nancy and her fiancé and Jim Farrell. 

Tony has written Eilis several times, but she stops reading his letters. What happened in Brooklyn can stay in Brooklyn. She even thinks about getting a divorce (despite there being no divorce law in Ireland until 1996). All of her deceptions, however, come to an abrupt end when Mrs. Ryan, a terrible snobbish woman in whose store she once worked in Enniscorthy, tells Eilis of a phone call she had with Madge Kehoe, who is her cousin in Brooklyn – the same Mrs. Kehoe who is her landlady. Mrs. Kehoe had been informed of Eilis’s marriage to Tony (possibly by Tony himself) and Eilis realizes instantly that her sojourn in Enniscorthy is over. She arranges a berthing on a ship leaving the following day. She tells her mother she is married and that her husband is nice, and her mother takes the news stoically. In the morning Eilis writes a note to Jim Farrell explaining as much as he deserves to know, and boards the train for Cobh. 

The novelist Colm Tóibín tells the story entirely through the somewhat narrow prism of Eilis. When I read of her return to Enniscorthy and how everyone appeared to have designs on her life, and how willingly she went along with them, I felt as betrayed as Tony might’ve been. But Eilis enjoys her homecoming in ways she never enjoyed her life before she went to Brooklyn. Rose was always the beautiful one, the glamorous one. But at 30, and unmarried, Rose had a secret that she could never tell – that she had a bad heart and that she could die at any moment. She made sure that Eilis was out of the house and in a life of her own before the blow would fall. When Eilis returns to Enniscorthy, she almost takes up where Rose had so suddenly left off. She is now someone in her home town. It’s no wonder that she – momentarily – wanted to forget about Brooklyn and stay home. 

It’s such a beautiful novel that all the film had to do was adopt a different narrative device, shifting from Eilis’s inner world to her outer one. And this is handled brilliantly. The worlds of 1950s Enniscorthy and Brooklyn are so vividly actualized. The film of Brooklyn is one of the most beautiful-looking films I have ever seen. The production design by Canadian François Séguin and the costume design by Odile Dicks-Mireau are so overwhelmingly and acutely palpable that they place the film in another realm entirely. It is all so fetching that they reduce the actors, some of whom are excellent, to shadowy figures in the foreground of a gorgeous tableaux. And Yves Bélanger’s camera is so much in love with it that it dwells on every detail.

There are only a few faces familiar to me in the cast. Apparently Saoirse Ronan* gained a little weight for the role, and it suits her performance. The wonderful Jim Broadbent has only a few scenes, but he is so marvelous to watch. Unfortunately, his is the only male face in the film that held my attention. Emory Cohen looks the role of Tony Fiorello, but he is nothing but his surfaces. Back in Ireland, Domhnall Gleeson, as Jim Farrell, is a negligible presence. These two uninteresting men make one worry about the dearth of Eilis’s chances for happiness, which for her are limited to her choice of a husband. As I mentioned, the novel ends with Eilis on the train to - eventually - the port of Cobh. In the film, a quite unnecessary reunion scene between Eilis and Tony on a Brooklyn street takes us out of the film, trying to convince us, I suppose, that the story ends happily. 

The Irish director, John Crowley, made the remarkable film Boy A in 2007. Here he indulges the same art of close-reef sailing (it is a little film, despite it being a British-Irish-Canadian production) and allows us the space and time to look at his film. There are a few ravishing moments that stand out, but my favorite is when we are shown Rose sitting on a bench by the River Slaney reading one of Eilis’s letters. Why anyone would ever want to leave such a place boggles the mind. 

*Apparently the same practical jokers who transliterate Chinese into the Roman alphabet, wherein Tsingtao Beer is pronounced “Ching-dow,” are also responsible for the spelling of Irish names. Saoirse, for example, is pronounced “Sur-sha.”