The Globe and Mail

Quietly, quietly. There's a hushed quality to the fiction of Irish writer Colm Tóibín, whether he's writing about a young man dying of AIDS in The Blackwater Lightship, a suffering Henry James in The Master or a young woman torn between Ireland and the United States in his latest novel, Brooklyn.

There's fodder for melodrama in each of these plots, but Tóibín is himself a master – like his countryman William Trevor – of a kind of deep gentleness, even as the darkness falls on his characters. “Understatement,” implying little more than a refined, dry wit, isn't quite the word. “Subtle” is a given. “Unblinking” is perhaps the best adjective: Here is a writer who quietly watches and reports, shocked at nothing, missing nothing.

Brooklyn opens in the Irish town of Enniscorthy, Wexford, in 1951. Eilis Lacey (in her late teens or early 20s, we're never told) lives with her widowed mother and glamorous elder sister, Rose. Eilis studies bookkeeping but can't find work.

Her three brothers, facing the same problem, have left for England. Rose, an accountant, is the family breadwinner. Eilis accepts a job in a grocery under the poisonous Miss Kelly, but is reluctant to tell Rose, who wants her to hold out for something in an office.

Later, Eilis is snubbed at a dance by the local publican's son, widely considered a catch because of his father's status in the town. Tóibín lingers over this scene-setting, establishing a caste system as intricate as anything Gandhi opposed in India.

One day, the family is visited by an American priest, Father Flood, who says Eilis would have no trouble finding work in the United States. His Brooklyn parish is “just like Ireland,” and he himself will help her get set up there. “In the silence that had lingered, she realized, it had somehow been tacitly arranged that Eilis would go to America. Father Flood, she believed, had been invited to the house because Rose knew that he could arrange it.”

Omission is a virtue in Tóibín's world, the mark of a supremely confident and technically assured writer

And so she goes to Brooklyn, as clever readers of the novel's title will have guessed. She takes a room in an Irish girls' boarding house and a job at Bartocci's department store, where the owners' egalitarianism is exhilarating after Miss Kelly's Brahmin-bitch act. “Brooklyn changes every day,” Eilis is told. “New people arrive and they could be Jewish or Irish or Polish or even coloured. ... We treat everyone the same.” Though of course they don't, as Eilis gets to observe first-hand when Bartocci's becomes the first white-owned shop in Brooklyn to stock red fox, sepia and coffee-coloured stockings, hoping to attract an African-American clientele.

Eilis confronts issues of race and status and convention in her personal life also, when she begins to date a young Italian American. Their sweetly clandestine romance is interrupted by a family emergency back home, and the last quarter of the novel is given over to Eilis's return to Enniscorthy. Suddenly, due to her new American glamour, Ireland offers up its goods to her: work, status, maybe even love. Should she stay or should she go?

There's something of the Alice Munro heroine to Eilis: the quietly observant girl/woman who wants sex and work and freedom and knows how to get them. Indeed, the reviewer is conscious of a slightly tiresome obligation to praise Tóibín's ability to get inside the head of a female character. Though isn't this just a way of saying that he has endowed his heroine with more humanity than we might otherwise have hoped for, or expected?

It helps to have a writer who understands the need to make his characters as bright and complex as possible, and Eilis is all of that. She shares her creator's unblinking quality, and can seem older than her years. At Bartocci's, she is chosen to wait on those first African-American customers because she won't make a spectacle of herself, or of them. She extracts herself quietly and without fuss from her (female) boss's sexual advances, and mentions kissing her own boyfriend – first boyfriend, first kisses – only offhandedly, after the fact.

Omission is a virtue in Tóibín's world, the mark of a supremely confident and technically assured writer. Physical descriptions are cursory; we never see Eilis say goodbye to her family when she leaves for America; the reader can only figure out the year from a reference to the premiere of the movie Singin' in the Rain, halfway through the book.

Some readers might wish to read Eilis's emotions a little more clearly: How does she remain so unfazed by the New World? Why does she seem to feel so little guilt over the second romance she strikes up back at home? Others will find that these absences and the overall sparing use of detail pleasingly evoke a Ken Burns documentary, with the camera panning across sepia-toned stills, creating movement out of apparent stasis.

The other great quality of Tóibín's writing is his moral maturity. Brooklyn has no pure-good or pure-evil characters. Even the dread Miss Kelly, we're told, was bullied as a child. We don't have to like her, but we do have to think about her, consider her, give her due attention. The mirroring between Ireland and America – Eilis's two jobs, two boyfriends, two futures – is effective because the intent isn't simply ironic; there are no easy choices here. Rather, we see that the star of the story is never the place but the person; it is always Eilis who compels, because she holds both worlds – plainly, quietly, paradoxically, essentially – within her.

Annabel Lyon's novel The Golden Mean is forthcoming in August.