Colm Tóibín on the state of Irish literature, his favourite Australian writers and his latest novel, Long Island

Australia Broadcast Center

15-05-2025

Colm Tóibín — the Booker Prize-shortlisted Irish author — has already decided what he will read on the plane when he travels to Australia this week to attend the Melbourne and Sydney writers' festivals: Helen Garner's three-volume diaries.
He's not the only international guest who has used the long flight from the northern hemisphere to read Garner's journals, recently published in the UK in one formidable edition.
At Adelaide Writers Week, British writer Charlotte Mendelson told Kate Evans, host of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, that's what she read on the plane, too.
"Everyone I know is reading Helen Garner," Tóibín tells ABC Arts, speaking via Zoom from his home in LA.
Tóibín, who turns 70 this year, is the author of 11 novels, including The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004) and The Testament of Mary (2013), all shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
He's well-versed in Australia's local literary scene, partly owing to his one-time side hustle as a publisher.
In 2008, Tóibín and his agent, Peter Straus, established a small publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, which published Australian authors, including David Malouf and Tim Winton, in the UK.
It also published Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, which turned out to be a barbecue stopper there in the same way it was in Australia.
"Every single person that summer was reading The Slap," Tóibín says.
While the likes of Tóibín and his compatriots Sebastian Barry, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney are exalted figures in Australia, Tóibín pushes back against the popular belief that Irish literature exceeds anything on offer here.
"We haven't produced Germaine Greer … We haven't produced Robert Hughes. We haven't produced Richard Flanagan," he says.
Nor, he says, has Ireland produced a diarist to compare with Helen Garner.
In Australia, the author will attend events in Melbourne and Sydney to discuss the state of Irish literature and his latest novel, Long Island, a follow-up to 2009's much-loved Brooklyn.
In Brooklyn, set in the 1950s, the young Eilis Lacey leaves her home in the Irish town of Enniscorthy — where Tóibín grew up — to emigrate to the US.
Despite her homesickness, she makes a new life in New York, studying bookkeeping and becoming engaged to a charming Italian plumber, Tony Fiorello.
But when she returns to Ireland to visit her family, she feels the pull of home and forms a relationship with a local boy called Jim Farrell.
Long Island picks up 20 years later. It's 1976, and Eilis is living on Long Island with her husband Tony and their children, Rosella and Larry, when a knock at the door up-ends her life.
She finds a man on her doorstep who angrily informs Eilis that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child. He says he will not have the baby in his house and will leave it with Tony's family to raise when it is born.
Furious with Tony and suffocated by his close-knit family, who live in neighbouring houses on the same street, Eilis escapes to Ireland to visit her mother for her 80th birthday. There, she reconnects with Jim and imagines another life without Tony.
Early on, Tóibín wasn't sure if Brooklyn was a novel or a long short story.
He was surprised that a character like the passive, amenable Eilis captured so many readers' hearts.
"There's no great heroism there. She's one of those figures who live in the shadows," he says.
"She's open to suggestion, meaning people like her, but she does nothing to gain their friendship. She doesn't look in the mirror much. She just wanders about in a sort of dream. She drifts, and I was interested in that idea of drifting."
Tóibín based his early sketches of Eilis on his Aunt Harriet, his mother's younger sister, who worked in the office of a mill and played golf, like Eilis's sister Rose.
"But at the same time," he says, "the character is invented."
Unlike Eilis, Aunt Harriet never left Enniscorthy, which allowed his imagination to take over when Eilis began her new life in the US.
"That, in a way, gave me the book," he says. "If [Aunt Harriet] had [left], I would have had too much material, too much fact, too much dull business of days."
Tóibín is famously critical of sequels, which he says "destroy" the original book, and he never intended to write a follow-up to Brooklyn.
It was only after the idea for the sequel's premise — Eilis's unenviable predicament — lodged in his head that he found himself "drifting" into the story.
While many readers relished the chance to sink into Eilis's world once again, a sequel carries the risk of displeasing a readership already invested in a beloved character, as Tóibín has discovered.
He has received a surprising number of emails from disgruntled readers voicing their desire for a neater resolution to the second story.
But a Hollywood ending was never on the cards.
"I wouldn't have done it any other way," Tóibín says.
"The problem with this novel is you cannot offer a conclusion that is satisfactory because, no matter what you do, it has to end in compromise and disappointment … I think readers wanted things to end in one way, and they were never going to end in that way, ever."
Tóibín is relatively unperturbed by the feedback.
"I know this is a very old argument because Henry James [the subject of Tóibín's novel The Master] had the same sort of pushback in 1881 when he published Portrait of a Lady," he says. "People thought the ending … was abrupt and unsatisfactory."
It could be that Tóibín is feeling the effects of mainstream success.
While Brooklyn was critically acclaimed, making the 2009 Booker longlist, the 2015 film adaptation reached a much larger audience.
Brooklyn was a box office success and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (for writer Nick Hornby) and Best Actress (for Saoirse Ryan's commanding portrayal of Eilis).
While the film hewed closely to the book, it focused on the love story — would Eilis choose Tony or Jim? — rather than the difficult choice she must make between the safe but limited world of Ireland and the possibility offered by a life far from home in the US.
Tóibín, for his part, loved the film, particularly Domhnall Gleeson's portrayal of Jim.
Irish characters are often presented as charming but drunk and unstable "maniacs", Tóibín says. But here was Gleeson "showing an Irishman … as stable, trustworthy, tolerant, middle-of-the-road, easy-going".
"I got a lot of energy from Domhnall's performance," he says.
So, how has Eilis changed in the two decades between Brooklyn's end and Long Island's beginning?
Feminism, for one.
"While she doesn't refer to it, it makes it all the more real and present. She isn't reading [feminist writers] Kate Millett or Germaine Greer, but something has happened to her," Tóibín says.
"For example, she believes her daughter should get the same or even a better education than her son. That's a big moment to say Rosella is going to university … to study law [and Larry isn't]."
This newly empowered Eilis asserts her will in other ways, like subscribing to the New York Times, which she reads at home in solitude instead of attending the Fiorello family's boisterous all-in Sunday meals.
It's a bold act of independence. In staking out time for herself every week, Eilis draws a boundary with her overbearing in-laws that would be hard to imagine for the passive young woman of Brooklyn.
"She's become a much more thoughtful, serious person," Tóibín says.
Tóibín, the outgoing Irish Laureate for Fiction, belongs to a literary culture that's celebrated around the world.
Theories abound as to why Ireland, a country of 5 million, produces so many talented writers.
Some trace the inventiveness of Irish literature to the intermingling of the English and Irish languages over time.
Then there's the Irish tradition of storytelling, and the effect of widespread poverty that accompanied colonisation and the 19th-century famine.
"We didn't have symphonies; we didn't have Rembrandt," Tóibín says. "Paper and pen are very cheap; you don't need any resources."
Also shaping the Irish literary tradition is the culture's penchant for secrecy, a product of centuries of Catholic repression.
"There are a great number of things that people don't talk about in Ireland," Tóibín says.
"Maybe it's true everywhere, but you notice the distance between speech and thought, and there's always a novel in that."
Writers in Ireland benefit from government funding in the form of literary bursaries, a translation fund and the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, which pays a living wage to eligible artists.
A national arts academy, the Aosdána, also pays a stipend to its members to make sure they don't "starve", Tóibín says.
When the result is a culture that produces a body of work as powerful as Tóibín's, it's an easy case to make.
Colm Tóibín appears at Sydney Writers' Festival (which runs from May 19 to May 27) and in Melbourne (May 19 and May 21), presented by The Wheeler Centre and Melbourne Writers Festival.