The Merton Big Read 2024: Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

I’ve just finished reading Brooklyn by Colm Toibin; it’s hard to put down! This book is wonderfully written, particularly in regards to characterization and a somewhat unlikeable protagonist.

Very excited to be joining in The Merton Big Read Festival in 2024. Though I loved the movie (I never watch a film before I read the book. Someone must have made me do it!), I’ve never been a huge fan of movie tie-in book covers. I feel it takes away a reader’s ability to imagine the characters!
 
Still, I was determined to join The Big Read this year because I wasn’t able to in 2023. So putting aside my silly book cover prejudice and fell into Brooklyn in the 1950s.

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What writers can get from this book
Writers and authors should read Brooklyn with an eye toward characterization. Readers empathize with Eilis, but they don’t always like her. Eilis has a stony façade; she also doesn’t hold back from saying or doing mean things from time to time. Yet her landlady at her boarding house says she’s the only one with manners. It’s hard for readers to imagine the behavior of the others could be if Eilis is the polite one.
 
That’s how Toibin creates interest: we see Eilis’s inner mind, we know she what she wants or doesn’t want. The contrasts between her wants and her actions is what makes readers turn the page. We want to know how she’s going to get away with it.
 
Toibin has created a woman who is not only of her time but also who imbues the desire of modern readers to see a woman bucking the trend, of not being a damsel in destress.
 
This is a story about several woman who work, who make their lives, who make choices. There’s no fierceness, no defiance; she has goals, motivation, and drive.
 
It’s refreshing to read of a woman who occasionally says those mean things, who ditches the unpopular girl to meet a guy. Readers can relate to this character because she does what readers want to be able to do without feeling guilt, and that’s Toibin’s mastery: setting readers free from the invisible constraints society has placed upon them. And this is despite Eilis living in a far-more rigid society and era.
 
Another reason authors should pay attention to Brooklyn is because it lacks an antagonist. Eilis is really only fighting herself. People she knows and works with, her landlady; her boss; her fellow boarding-house mates; serve as antagonizing forces, but her main turmoil is all interior, all about her making choices and sticking with them. Eilis is not indecisive and that makes her interesting, and that’s what kept me turning pages!

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Scripts and screenplays
I’m going to rewatch the film with the book in hand and see how the story changes from book to script. Just another way to practice adapting novels for the screen!

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Summary
Eilis Lacey’s is living a hum-drum life in Enniscorthy, Ireland. There’s no work and very little fun. Her life is about to change. After finishing a bookkeeping course and doing some basic sales in the local grocery, she’s presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: passage to America.
 
Once off the boat, she’s thrown into life as a single young, immigrant woman in 1950s New York: work during the weekdays, church on Sundays, helping in the local parish. When Father Flood starts holding dances every Friday night in the parish hall, she meets Tony. Nothing is ever the same.
 
Eilis navigates international travel, a new country and homesickness, work, college courses, and young love, but where is her life going? She’s unable to answer that until she unexpectedly must get back to Ireland. When she’s home, she understands she’s redefined that word, and what she wants to do with her life.