Colm Tóibín on priests, loss and the half-said thing

‘No matter what I’m writing,’ says Colm Tóibín, ‘someone ends up getting abandoned. Or someone goes. No matter what I’m trying to do it comes in.’ It’s a reflection, he says, of his own consciousness. It makes ‘its way into everything’.

If Tóibín is on close terms with the ache of loss, few writers have put it to such elegant use. He is in the midst of a period of roaring success: we are sitting in a hotel in Soho, talking about the new film of his 2009 novel Brooklyn, which has the lure and pain of leaving Ireland and family at its heart.

Its heroine is Eilis Lacey, a young woman in the 1950s who is helped by an emigrant priest, Father Flood, to leave her home in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, for a fresh start in New York. The book has translated well, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby carrying its potent mixture of sadness, exhilaration and sly wit to the cinema.