Irish Examiner view: Colm Tóibín will bring readers into a different world to that of 'Brooklyn'

The original novel resonated deeply with Irish readers so the sequel, set some decades later, is a mouth-watering prospect

Domhnall Gleeson as Jim Farrell and Saoirse Ronan as Ellis Lacey in the 2015 film adaptation of 'Brooklyn'. File picture: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Even casual readers would have noticed the huge success of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn 14 year ago.

Tóibín told a story so familiar to Irish readers that there could hardly have been one who didn’t recognise the bare bones of the plot from their own family histories — a young woman leaves Ireland as an emigrant to make her way in America and wonders whether to come home or to stay abroad.

The success of the book around the world suggested a narrative which resonated with communities far from Tóibín’s Irish setting, his native Wexford. However, when the book was filmed, with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, the movie version included a recreation of 1950s Enniscorthy which surely provided older Irish viewers with bittersweet memories of their own younger days.

Yesterday it was announced that Colm Tóibín is to publish a sequel to Brooklyn featuring its original protagonist Eilis Lacey 20 years later — now living with her husband and children on Long Island, immersed in the tumult of the 1970s.

Fans of the original book will no doubt be keen to see how life has turned out for Eilis Lacey, with a curious doubling effect involved — anyone who read the book when it was published (14 years ago) is now reading about the original characters 20 years later. Readers and protagonists alike have moved on.

Tóibín is a master storyteller, so those readers will no doubt be entertained, but it will be interesting to read a narrative not aired as often as the 1950s emigrant experience à la Brooklyn — namely, the long afterlife of the emigrant who becomes part of a different culture. In that, Eilis Lacey may end up representing an entirely different Irish experience, but one common to many thousands over the generations.