Brooklyn

Something over ten years ago BH and I both read a book called 'Brooklyn' by one Colm Tóibín, a ladies book about a young girl from the southeast of Ireland making her way in Brooklyn in the early 1950's. With the Irish part of the book set more or less in Tóibín's birthplace, but just before he was actually born. Perhaps as far as that goes, the same distance in time between writing and setting as in the books of George Elliot. Or, without checking, Thomas Hardy. I dare say a bit of distance helps balance, but not so much distance that you have lost touch.

Then quite by chance yesterday evening, we watched the film that had been made of the book in 2015. Watched on BBC4, a channel which I use very rarely and which meant that there were no advertisement breaks - so a hundred minutes of it, straight through. Which, I may say, we are no longer used to. We always turn the sound off for the breaks so that we are not too distracted from whatever it is that we are watching, but they do have their points. They do provide a bit of framing and one does get used to them.

A period drama, complete with costumes, small towns and immigrant communities: rather good, although as with the book, I found it a little long. And the ladies' book has become a ladies' film, although one that I could manage OK. I was also a bit annoyed by the heroine not coming clean about having got married when she went home for a visit and getting rather tangled up in consequence. I wonder now how that worked in the book: probably a bit more nuanced than it seemed on the screen.

Good to be reminded that provincial Ireland of that time was not so very different from provincial England.

Interesting to learn that one could afford the fare back to Ireland after a year or so as a shop girl in Brooklyn, albeit in a better class of store, one which ran to pneumatic tubes for the management of cash. From where I associate to the little wooden booths for cash in the Foyles of old, in the days when it was a lot bigger and grander than it is now. And near rather than at its present location in Charing Cross Road.

I wonder also when passenger liners stopped running between Cork and New York. Sixty years ago? The one shown here was nothing like as grand inside as the Canadian Pacific liner I travelled to Montreal on (from Liverpool), maybe fifteen years after this film was set. And, as far as I recall, our stateroom might have been in the depths and of about the same size as the one shown here, but the furnishings were better and I don't think we had to share our bathroom, one between each pair of two bunk staterooms as shown here. Perhaps the difference was that we had a four bunk stateroom.

Reference 1: Brooklyn (film) - Wikipedia.

Reference 2: pumpkinstrokemarrow. The story back in 2009.