The Irish writer’s latest novel returns to the world of Eilis Lacey.
It’s 1 o’clock in the morning in New York and Colm Toibin has just got home. He’s been to the opera and his mind is full of the music of Gounot’sHe quite liked it, but the problem with the Met production lay in what was missing. When he was 15 and at home in Enniscorthy, the Irish writer first listened to a record featuring the singing of Joan Sutherland and things have never been the same since.
It wasn’t as if he had a great novel rattling around his head and decided because of some ethical sense not to write it.Yet ... he did have an image 20 years later of Eilis’ brother walking on a beach with two tall teenagers with dark eyes and hair who didn’t look Irish. “And someone stopped to say, ‘oh my, who are they?’ ‘Oh, they’re Eilis’.’ And someone just says in that very Wexford way, ‘are they?’ with all the meaning.
Some writers whose work has been successfully adapted for the screen often see their characters as the actors who played them. John le Carre, for example, could see only Alec Guinness when he wrote more about George Smiley. That wasn’t the case with Toibin when he returned to Eilis; as a character she was so fixed for him. And anyway, “Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal was so particular”.The performance that did “matter enormously” to him was Domhnall Gleeson as Jim.
But the interest in the idea of homecoming is still there, particularly from America, a country that seemed so glamorous. “Except,” Toibin points out, “to the person coming from America.”
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