In A Soldier of the Great War, Alessandro Giuliani, 74, a survivor of World War I, a survivor of fighting along the Isonzo, and in the Alps, a warrior spared execution, a prisoner of war who makes his escape, a great climber of mountains, a Professor of Aesthetics, a man reported dead three times, and a lover of one woman, Ariane, a man devoted to his son, a grieving husband and father, someone who has never forgotten his comrades in arms, someone who has spent his life in love with light, paintings, and music, walks along a dusty road with a callow young man, readying himself for his death. On their long walk, he tells him his life story.
In Long Island, the sequel to Brooklyn, Ellis Lacey, now mother of 2 and wife to a man, Tony, who has betrayed her, is visiting Enniscorthy, her Irish home, to escape her home compound of her husband’s family and to visit her disagreeable mother for her 80th birthday. In Ireland, she reconnects with Jim Farrell, the man she left for Tony and now the secret lover of Nancy Sheridan, once Ellis’ best friend. The soap-opera cliches of such a triangle vanish within the expressive inner lives of these 3 characters.
As dominant themes, both books display the effects of the longing for one person and the trials that arrive when love is pursued. Both books pose similar questions:
How does one set aside emotional scars and regret, loss and bitterness, and remain hopeful, even if damaged?
How does a place and a nationality mold a person? What is our core identity no matter where we live, or is what we imagine as our rock-core selves more tractable, more biddable, than we might have imagined?
How do we ever decide what we want from another? How is it possible to ever know the answer to that question with any degree of certainty?
How do emotional and physical wounds affect us? How might dreams give comfort to such wounds?
Alessandro Giuliani is not rendered bitter and alienated by his combat. Close to the end of the book he says, “Beauty has no explanation, but its right perfection elicits love.” He comes to the end of his life thankful for its beauty, thankful for his wife and son and comrades, thankful that he was allowed 74 years of beauty in so many of its presentations – in faces, in paintings, in mountains, in the sweep of men going off to battle, in his love of others.
All of the main characters, but especially Ellis Lacey, come to the end of Long Island facing a maze of difficult choices*. Happiness is guaranteed none of them. What stays with me though is how often what we want, what the characters want, dissuades us and them from thinking clearly, and thus we all find ourselves spinning out dreams of what will be … if every stone is set exactly right, if every variable breaks our way. Only Nancy acts decisively to try to claim what she believes she must have.
Much contemporary literary fiction I read seems not to believe in its characters’ inner lives, in the essential wildness of that terrain. Instead, stereotypes abound — they imply that this is what one should feel, think, react, choose.
These two books accept our confusions and honor our yearnings and never try to jam their characters into neat definitions of what it means to be an acceptable human, a preferred human. They both believe that being human encompasses ranges of contradictions and depths of feeling that cannot be predicted.
They are wonderful books.
*Colm Toibin must write a third book to finish the set.
