When she meets Tony, her openness to what is evidently his courtship seems less to do with love, or even physical attraction, than with the pleasure of easy dialogue, unknown before in the novel. Dialogue is often covert monologue, and Eilis has to suffer it. 'I didn't come all the way to America, thank you, to hear people talking Italian on the street or see them wearing funny hats,' she says. One day she goes for a walk with Miss McAdam, a prim girl from Belfast who works as a secretary, and a single sentence suffices to represent the talk that Eilis has to endure. If she squeals once more, I'll have to get the doctor or the vet to give her something to calm her down.' That fantastic thought – 'or the vet' – is an irrefutable squeeze of idiosyncrasy.Īround Eilis, people must be talking – the other girls in the boarding house, the workers and customers in the department store where she works – but only fragments of dialogue reach us. 'That Diana has a terrible voice, God help her. Regretting the 'giddiness' that possesses her lodgers the day after a dance, she singles out one of them. 'As they sat at the table, she did not like the girls talking among themselves, or discussing matters she knew nothing about, and she did not encourage any mention of boyfriends.' Dialogue has to take place via her, and she has something of Miss Kelly's gift for disapproving assertion. Mrs Kehoe, the landlady of her boarding house, comes from Wexford and is suspicious of talk. But at the opening of part two, with Eilis living in Brooklyn, a kind of silence settles on the novel. She shares a tiny cabin with an Englishwoman called Georgina, who smokes and swears and is free of the conversational restraints to which Eilis and the reader have become habituated.

The novel's first part ends with Eilis enduring a grim third-class passage across the Atlantic.

''No one likes flies,' Miss Kelly said, 'especially on a Sunday.'' Eilis watches as Mary, Miss Kelly's bullied assistant, puts up fly paper. What can you do?' Not question her meaning, certainly. 'Now there are people who come in here on a Sunday, if you don't mind, looking for things they should get during the week. The baleful Miss Kelly, who runs the most superior of the town's grocery shops, is peculiarly unanswerable. The novel has an acute ear for speech that brooks no response. Yet it is because Tóibín's characters do not really exchange their thoughts that dialogue can also be comic. It is a shock: dialogue is for implying but not stating fears and feelings. 'Oh, it'll kill me when she goes,' her mother said. The neighbour, almost casually, as a way of conversation, said: 'You'll miss her when she's gone, I'd say.'

Brooklyn a novel by colm toibin