Tóibín's gift is to demonstrate how extraordinary the mundane can be – or at least, how special an individual life is to the individual who is living it. Sure, he's done a fine job of bringing the characters to life and giving them a real-seeming world in which to move around – but to what end?Īn answer of sorts began to dawn on me as I became increasingly wrapped up and read more attentively. What can you do?' asks Miss Kelly, the owner of the only shop in Eilis's neighbourhood that opens on a Sunday.) Yet breaking away from the novel, I sometimes wondered why on earth he was telling me about this unremarkable woman's unremarkable life. ('Now there are people who come here on a Sunday, if you don't mind, looking for things they should get during the week. There's also a good streak of sly humour – the kind you laugh about half a page after you've read it. Nothing demonstrative, just a general lean cleanness. There's a certain beauty to Toibin's prose. Which goes to explain why Brooklyn initially caused me some confusion. Pretty much the most exciting thing Eilis does is to attend dances organised by the local clergyman and even those she tends to leave early. Then she's in a boarding house where gossip is frowned upon and the landlady insists that most conversations revolve around fashion. First she spends a lot of time at the kitchen table in a small nondescript house in Ireland with her taciturn mother and older sister. When she isn't at this dull and routine work, we generally see Eilis at home. We learn about Eilis's work in a shop in Ireland, then another in Brooklyn, together with a course in bookkeeping she takes to advance her career. Tóibín himself is said to have described the book as 'quite low key, about somebody very ordinary' and the details he attends to are everyday, even banal. It tells simply of the move a young Irishwoman – Eilis Lacey – makes from Wexford to New York City in the 1950s, of her generally happy relationship there with an Italian American called Tony, and of a trip she takes back to Ireland to attend a funeral.

Don't, as I almost did, let that put you off. Superficially, Brooklyn is a book in which very little happens.

Toibin colm brooklyn