We might guess: it’s to do with the fun of exercising influence because you can, of having people around you who feel a sense of gratitude and obligation. And as to why he does it… we don’t know, because Eilis doesn’t. This is a world in which it really means something to be a Catholic priest in New York. A Brooklyn priest, originally from Ireland, suggests that a job in the USA might be just the thing – and almost before she realises what’s happening, Eilis has agreed and is signing the papers the priest has conjured up. But others are thinking out her future on her behalf….Ībout 30 pages in, it turns out that the task Toibin must have set himself in Part 1 is to tell us all we need to know about the place Eilis is soon going to leave. She can’t survive on an underpaid Sunday job in one of the local shops, although Eilis never lets herself think this in so many words. Toibin lets these rigid facts of life emerge through the conversations we hear and from Eilis’s thoughts as she ponders her own future. And there’s nothing for a girl to look forward to but a job, if she’s lucky, and then marriage. There’s a pecking order in the town, and snobbery to go with it, but it’s all a bit pathetic: the ones highest up it seem to be shopkeepers or pub landlords. This house of women used to have men in it – father dead, brothers forced to work in England, so we must be in the second half of the 20th Century – and, because this is Ireland, times are hard and jobs are scarce…. Over the next 20 or 30 pages, through a number of scenes – house, shop, dance-hall – we find out how things work here. He’s with Eilis from the beginning, looking up from her book-keeping homework at her sister arriving home…. One of his techniques is to make us find things out slowly. But… but what? Is it really any more than a virtuoso display of craftsmanship? And what’s wrong with a bit of perfect craftsmanship anyway? Hmmm.

Don’t get me wrong: the technique is perfect. Plenty of writers might do something like that, but not this one: the point of view is with Eilis from the start, and that’s where it’s staying. He’s set it at around the time, and in precisely the place, where he was born – so if he was a different novelist he could whisk us away from the events in Eilis’s life and over to a maternity hospital where the writer himself is about to be born…. Here he is, an Irishman in his mid-50s, offering us a faultless evocation of the life of a young woman. Toibin is doing something really impressive in this novel – but, nearly 100 pages in, I’m not sure why he’s doing it.

Brooklyn toibin