Colm Toibin: “Brooklyn”, Colum McCann: “Let the Great World Spin”

The two writers have the same names (give or take a “u”) and cover the same terrain in their latest novels (give or take a borough). But in every other respect, the recent transatlantic novels from those giants of Irish fiction, Colm Toibin and Colum McCann, couldn”t be more different. 

Colm Toibin: “Brooklyn”
The particular atmosphere and characters of Graham Greene’s novels were said to belong in the fictional country of Greeneland. One could say the same about Colm Toibin’s work. Toibinland is a place where colours are muted and voices are rarely raised. The author can transform a nylon sale in Bartocci’s department store in Brooklyn into a Jamesian drawing-room. His prose is weighed as carefully as the dry goods which Eilis Lacey, his protagonist, measures out in Mrs Kelly’s Enniscorthy shop. Toibin is a minimalist. His simple descriptive sentences are precise, the controlled rhythm of his prose carries us along like the transatlantic liner that takes Eilis from Liverpool to New York;
Eilis is a strangely passive heroine. Decisions are made for her and she allows herself be swept along. Father Flood, a pushy Irish-American priest, makes it a personal mission to see her established in his Brooklyn parish, living in his friend Mrs Kehoe’s boarding house and working in Bartocci’s. We follow Eilis’s thoughts as she lets herself be managed, bossed around, organized, courted, seduced. Only in pursuing her education does she show any initiative or perseverance.
Provincial life on both sides of the Atlantic is sharply evoked. Brooklyn, or the part that Eilis inhabits, is essentially a Little Wexford, while the rest of the U.S., even nearby Manhattan, is terra incognita. The narrative is bookended by two formidable, perfectly-drawn characters: Mrs Kelly the shopkeeper and Mrs. Kehoe, who keeps a boarding house in Brooklyn. Both are small-town snobs who would be comical but for a sinister streak in each that proves the undoing of Eilis.
Letters and to a lesser extent, phone calls, are important for what they leave out rather than what they contain: expressions of love, anger, grief and other human emotion are entirely absent. This is partly a reflection of the times (Ireland in the 1950s) but also a function of Toibin’s deliberately affectless style in which seasickness is described with the same detachment as falling in love or bereavement.
Liam McIlvanney in the London Review of Books ruined “Brooklyn” for thousands of readers, including this one, by recounting key episodes in detail and giving away the denouement.  That won’t happen here. Suffice to say that it is worth getting through the longueurs in “Brooklyn” (of which there are many) to see how Eilis solves the dilemma of choosing between the new life or the old.

Colum McCann: “Let the Great World Spin”
An adopted New Yorker, Colum McCann already showed us, in “This Side of Brightness”, how he could bring his teeming imagination to bear on that equally teeming city and fix it in tense, muscular prose. That novel took place almost entirely underneath the streets of Manhattan and evoked a strange, unsettling world hidden from the view of the bustling crowds above. His new book sets its sights even higher, in every sense.
“Let the Great World Spin” begins with a massive build-up: a commotion of police and fire trucks around the World Trade Centre and a crowd transfixed below. “The whole August morning was blown right open”, we read. August? No, the date is not 9/11/2001 but 8/7/74, the date of Philippe Petit’s audacious tightrope walk between the still unfinished towers… and the explosion that comes a few pages later is not in New York but in Kildare Street in Dublin. McCann deals in uncomfortable truths; “Many of the watchers realized with a shiver that… they really wanted to witness a great fall”.
After this tour de force, McCann’s narrative swoops from the dizzying space between the Twin Towers to the metal plate between two subway cars, from Sandymount Strand to Vietnam. He slowly weaves together the lives of disparate people affected directly or indirectly by Petit”s tightrope walk: the hookers, the priest, the Park Avenue matron, the 14-year-old hacker, the obsessive photographer - and the most unexpected connections become manifest.
The title comes from Tennyson’s poem Locksley Hall:  “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change”.  A faithful evocation of Nixon”s America in the 1970s, “Let the Great World Spin” also apprehends – but never spells out – the shape of life-changing things to come, from the birth of the Internet (referenced as the Arpanet, its original military application) to the cataclysm of 11 September 2001 which inevitably overshadows the delicate descriptions of Petit’s acrobatics on the wire between the Towers in 1974.
New York City “…accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.”  Shot through the novel, those “little shocks of good” brighten the lives of the homeless, the drunks, the cast-offs, “the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless”, that McCann excels at describing as he weaves strands of change, hope and redemption through his astonishing book.

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Jean O’Sullivan spoke to Colum McCann on the phone somewhere between Grenoble and Paris, over the rattle of the train and the loud chatter of his entourage.

Colum McCann site ; www.colummccann.com