I have been reading Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín as of late. I’d started it over Christmas and was somewhat bemused by some vague similarities I felt between it and A Place of Stones by Deirdre Purcell. I’m not quite sure what to make of it to be honest.
This is not generally a good sign. It means I’m still bemused. It’s not that I expected a Sven Hassel anti-war effort here with loads of violence; and I’m a bit nervy about claims by the Independent on Sunday that it is impossible to read Toibin without being moved, touched, and finally changed. He’s not that powerful in my view; I can’t think of a single book that really changed my life with the possible exception of Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett.
Anyway, several thoughts have occurred to me about this and the key one is that Ireland has changed a whole lot since the 1950s and much of it is all to the good; I’m glad, for example, it’s possible to get home for funerals comparatively easily, and that the compulsion on women to marry for money is much less (as in, you don’t have to get married just to be provided for, etc). But I didn’t really warm that much to the primary character, and insofaras he painted the love interest, I wasn’t hugely touched by him either. Some of the characters seemed to be…somewhat cardboard, two dimensional, such as others in the boarding house where the main character was living when she got to Brooklyn.
The overwhelming impression I got however was that really and truly, Maeve does this much, much better. And I’m not sure that Colm Tóibín especially wanted to write the sort of book that Maeve Binchy is better known for, particularly since she does it much better.
I got the book as a Christmas present and it was an utterly perfect present in that it was something I wouldn’t have thought of buying for myself. It has not however sold me the idea of reading any more Colm Tóibín.
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