For other readers, this was a novel rooted in literature. For Americans, Tóibín thought, the story was 'about them' – about some forebear who had arrived in a new world of opportunities as well as difficulties.

'She knows no better.' 'This is not a criticism,' the reader added, for the paralysis was true to the time and place of Eilis's upbringing.Īn American reader wondered about different responses to the novel on different sides of the Atlantic, and the author agreed that American readers saw less of the melancholy than British and Irish readers. 'Her mother is watching and watching and watching.' Another online comment noted that, in inhabiting Eilis's psychology, the novel also had to mimic her 'paralysis': 'a forced and ingrained restraint'. 'I don't know if the readers get this' – but the murmurs of assent indicated that they did. Tóibín suggested that she does, however, know everything. Her mother says nothing – and asks nothing – about her daughter's attachment to anyone in America. The novel's interest is in dramatising Eilis's willingness to let decisions be made for her. 'Yes, a product of her times, but a sad reminder, perhaps, that even when we are passive, we are making choices.' 'I literally felt afraid for Eilis,' said another. 'I really loved the build-up to the final decision which the main character had to take,' one wrote. The pressure on the ending was felt by commenters on the book club website.

Was a life opening up for the protagonist? Or being narrowed down? This reader thought the ending was a 'tragedy', while others (including perhaps the author himself?) thought very differently. In this case, one reader actually asked the novelist for a close explanation of the teasing penultimate sentence of his book. Usually a novelist who comes to the book club is asked about the ending of his or her novel. 'I would have done anything,' he admitted. The author confessed that this intervention was also his own: he 'had to get Eilis out' of her quandary. Might Eilis have come to a different decision and made a different life if it had not been for this, the reader asked. Her decision is made for her by the intercession of a minor character: 'the evil Miss Kelly', as one member of the audience called her. Eilis, the novel's protagonist, has to choose between two countries, America and Ireland, and between two men. Several readers who came to hear Colm Tóibín discuss it at the Guardian book club tried, indeed, to imagine other endings. Brooklyn is a novel that invites the reader to imagine what could have happened differently.

Brooklyn a novel by colm toibin