The plot may sound like the stuff of soap operas, but Mr. Tóibín is essentially a dramatist of repression ... It’s a tricky thing, producing a novel from a style this muted and undemonstrative ... The confrontations between these people, so long delayed, feel momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, I think, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.
The characters in Long Island are constantly cautioning themselves not to say anything, for fear of upsetting that fine balance that exists in intimacy as much as in community. But not saying is an act with consequences, too — one that Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.
Colm Tóibín has an unhurried way of inviting the reader into his fictional world, like a perfect host who spoils you with delicious food and drink but at such a gentle pace you never feel overfed. Quite the opposite: When the feast is over, you are instantly ready to return for more ... Tóibín’s most intriguing stroke is the way he softly steps back from his main character to fully reveal and explore the stories of others ... A stirring journey, but its author does not showily dictate its speed or direction. He creates a heartbreaking world but does not impose it; instead, he parts a curtain and allows time for a slow, intense deepening of the drama behind it.
...the rare instance in which a sequel is every bit as good as the original ... As always, Tóibín's narrative restraint heightens tension and allows readers to fill in the blanks. We marvel at his skill as we watch his characters in Long Island become ensnared in the elaborate web of strategically withheld information and calculated partial truths he has them spin ... Tóibín handles these uncertainties and moral conundrums with exquisite delicacy, zigzagging back and forth through time to build to a devastating climax. The tragedy of this novel about the universality of longing is that, even 25 years on, Eilis, however decisive, is still not in control of her own life.
A busier book than its predecessors, more exciting in some ways but in others less satisfying. There is more plot...and less Eilis ... This exquisitely drawn, idiosyncratic soul turns out to be just another character in a novel after all.
As Long Island’s story unfolds and we follow the dissolution of Eilis’s marriage, along with her subsequent summer-long retreat to an Ireland already in the beginning stages of its own sea change, Tóibín asks that most American of questions: Can you go home again? His new novel suggests that to emigrate might itself be a fundamental betrayal ... Clever.
Tóibín is less interested in capturing a period than interiority ... Fans of Brooklyn will enjoy revisiting the characters, as well as cameos from previous novels set in Tóibín’s native Enniscorthy. But the carefully crafted characterisation for which he is so admired cedes some space to exposition of the back story and soap-operatic plotting, accelerating towards an inconclusive end.
The reader enjoys the subtle pleasure of fumbling blindly alongside the characters, with no idea where the book is heading. The ending is a real sucker punch: the novel that Tóibín has been building turns out to be a Rube Goldberg machine, each element precisely positioned for the marble to run helplessly down to its shattering finale ... The old objections came flooding back, along with a few new qualms. As before, the prose style seems to be aiming for bland invisibility ... The experience was a bit like spending a week in a remote country cottage: initially charming, but come Wednesday afternoon you find yourself gagging to get back on the wifi and have a properly hot shower.
Often reads like a masterclass in everything Tóibín can do. Minor characters are as well drawn as the main players ... The plot picks up pace – perhaps too much pace – in the last 50 pages, where events pile up in a way that threatens to violate the story’s slow build, and characters behave with unusual cunning and elan ... Silences and absences at the core of this subtle, intelligent and moving book mean the reader has to do a certain amount of work – but it is work very well rewarded.
Anything but pale. As for the characters, it is pure pleasure to be back in their absorbingly complex company ... Tóibín is the consummate cartographer of the private self, summoning with restrained acuity (and a delicious streak of sly humour) the thoughts his characters struggle to find words for, those parts of themselves that remain resolutely out of their reach ... This deceptively quiet novel is the work of a writer at the height of his considerable powers, a story of ordinary lives that contains multitudes. In general, it is true, sequels are pale things, but the exceptions to the rule are glorious, contriving both to satisfy on their own terms and to deepen the reader’s relationship with the book that came before. Long Island can safely count itself among their number.
[A] grand achievement ... A part of Tóibín’s genius is the lack of visible effort with which he draws us in, so seamless that we barely register our new surroundings by the time we’re consumed ... A rarity. After I began, I could barely stand to do anything else but finish it ... There is a kind of powerful calm in this novel, both on a sentence level and in the stately pace of the unfurling story. You feel that this is the destined culmination of a remarkable, lustrous career; you can experience not just your own enjoyment as a reader, but also Tóibín’s in the writing of it.
Excellent ... These problems might sound like an unrealistically big and messy tangle of moral dilemmas ... I could end this review by calling Tóibín a keen moral philosopher, but I’ll end it instead with the better compliment of calling him a great novelist who has written another wonderful book.
Toibin succeeds at writing characters who live real lives, human lives, our lives and a story that transcends Brooklyn, Long Island, Ireland and decades.
Much has been written of Toibin’s style, which at its worst confuses plainness with flatness and at its best hypnotises the reader into heightened sensitivity ... Toibin’s narrative voice, for all its omniscient chatter, is equally, teasingly discreet.
A book with an intricate architecture involving echoes and carefully timed disclosures, as with James’s novels. But it’s not a book that drowns in long, ornate sentences. Tóibín’s prose is so plain and unshowy, it can sometimes feel weightless ... I preferred this novel to Brooklyn, partly because it’s more suspenseful and gripping — the final 50 pages build to a nail-biting conclusion — but also because it feels more morally and psychologically meaty. As brilliantly as Tóibín evokes Eilis and her situation, she is a frustrating character, at times cold and passive, so it’s refreshing to experience her indecisiveness through the eyes of Jim and Nancy. Engrossing, truthful and humane, it’s a magnificent achievement.
Purely character driven, which may not thrill readers who prefer a faster pace. In its compelling interiority, though, there is plenty of beauty to savor.
Tóibín is a philosopher of the soul. He understands the complex emotions, the dreams, fear, doubt, and hope that drive human activity. Eilis is complicated, fearless, and compelling, much like her brilliant creator.
The author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s. A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
