The Brooklyn Rail

When a whale dies out in the ocean, its body often sinks to the ocean floor where it becomes what’s known as “whale fall”—a sudden, concentrated, long-term food source for ocean scavengers. Elizabeth O’Connor’s debut novel begins with a whale beaching on an isolated island off the coast of Wales. In an attempt to save it, the islanders “brought buckets of water, soaked blankets and coats and threw them over the whale.” The whale dies and the island’s men haul it out into the shallows where it “drifted out to sea, occasionally rolled lifelessly onto its back.” It returns again and again, with the tide serving as a stark reminder of the islanders’ vulnerability to whatever the sea might toss at them. The whale also serves as a harbinger for the arrival of two English ethnographers and a metaphor for the gradual destruction of the island’s way of life. (It’s 1938 and Europe is on the brink of war). As eighteen-year-old Manod notes the whale’s body decomposing throughout the novel, she assists the ethnographers (Joan and Edward) in accessing the island’s stories, songs, and people. Although the power relationship is unbalanced from the start—Manod is desperate for contact with the outside world while Joan and Edward see her as a naive and useful creature who can translate, take notes, and help them access the islanders—eventually Edward’s interest in Manod becomes more sinister, adding to Manod’s conflict.

In a recent interview, O’Connor speaks about the connection between the islanders and the island; she’s interested in “how our culture and ways of living might be influenced by the landscapes we live alongside, especially when those landscapes symbolize a kind of alienation and loss.” Like many of the islands she cites as influences on her fictional landscape, her island’s population is dwindling: empty cottages outnumber those still inhabited. The loss of neighbors, of opportunities for human contact, is part of the grief at the core of Manod’s story—and it is her story. Although Joan’s journal entries are included in the text, Manod is our guide through most of the novel—we feel her eagerness, her growing desire, her anger, and her heartbreak. For O’Connor, part of her goal in writing the novel is “to illuminate the ambitions, imagination, agency, and limitations a young woman might feel at a different point in history, reaching out to us now.” Manod’s mother is dead, and she is responsible for domestic chores and caring for her father and younger sister, the near-feral Llinos. Although Manod has a relationship with an island boy, Llew, and an eager follower, Marc, Manod wants more from life. Deemed “bright” by the nun who teaches the island’s children, Manod wants to go to university but instead is tasked with checking a male islander’s application. “On the last day of school my teacher had not even said goodbye. She said, I’ll see you at the market.” Manod daydreams of “working for a wealthy family as a seamstress, or being a nun somewhere in Europe, living in a tall white tower in a city square.” When Joan and Edward hire her to work for them, she imagines a life away from the island—attending university, singing for Edward’s colleague in Paris. We feel the intensity of her desire to leave and every slight Edward and Joan aim at her and the island’s people.

The physical presence of the island is loud throughout with a near relentless wind, an encroaching and unpredictable sea, and the movement of birds marking the passage of the seasons. From the opening sentences, the prose is direct, gorgeous, sometimes barren but rife with meaning. “After summer, the cold circles, then drops like a stone. The birds disappear one by one.… In autumn, the sea boils like a pot on the fire. The birds pass and the summer is gone.” In winter, the “sea sidles up to the door, laps at the edge of the island.… The wind makes red meat of us.” In spare language, we learn that the “island was three miles long and one mile wide, with a lighthouse marking the eastern point and a dark cave marking the west. There were twelve families, the minister, and Polish Lukasz who worked the lighthouse.” For Manod, the island is the breadth of her world—broken only by magazines and novels left behind by travelers. Suitcases sometimes wash up, and she salvages material, trying to copy patterns she sees in magazines.

We feel her deep loneliness living with a father who calls her by the dog’s name, when he speaks at all: “My father barely spoke to me or my sister, but at night I heard him mumble long conversations with Elis (the dog).” Her mother is only a memory of neglect and grief: “Most days I cannot remember what my mother looked like.” Instead, she remembers stories and songs—which she freely shares with Joan and Edward, not knowing until it’s too late that they will twist the island’s truths into their own narrative. As she grows closer to the English ethnographers, Manod builds her own dream-fueled narrative, and it is crushing when she has to face the reality of her situation. Although there is uplift at the end of the novel and we feel Manod’s determination to carve a better life for herself and her sister, there is also devastating heartbreak, and of course we can’t help but feel fear for the islanders with the coming war. As Manod says, “it felt as though something was circling us, waiting to land against the shore.”