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A review by slippy_underfoot
Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor
4.0
Set on a tiny Welsh island in 1938, Whale Fall follows 18-year-old Manod, who dreams of escaping her desolate surroundings. The island, just three miles long and home to a handful of families, survives on a brittle, declining, fishing economy, with most young men lost to mainland ambitions. Manod, resident in a small cottage with her father, sister, and dog, spends her days embroidering and studying English magazines, yearning for freedom.
Her life is changed by the arrival of two English anthropologists whose reports and transcriptions of local folklore are interwoven into the narrative. Their perspective offers a striking contrast to the actuality of island living. At the same time, the haunting presence of a stranded whale dominates the island’s physical and symbolic landscape. Dragged out to sea only to return, the whale, dark and decaying, has a broad and resonant metaphorical presence throughout the story.
O’Connor’s prose is rich, robust, and evocative, equally capable of rendering the great beauty and the ceaseless wearying roughness of the island. The islanders’ relationship to nature, symbiotic and vital, is wreathed in myths and legends to help them understand - and ceremonies which attempt to give them some agency over – its unpredictable impact on their lives. In turn the English visitors weave their own myths and legends around the often mundane and bleak realities of island life for much the same reasons.
When smirking salvage workers come to pick away the flesh of the whale to be used and sold as product, leaving the bones picked clean behind them, the harmonic lines of Manod’s narrative converge.
The tale is rendered in snatches, some a few pages, some a few lines, with extracts from recorded songs, stories, and observations of the anthropologists. I’ve seen a few reviews which cited this as a potential weakness, but I really responded to it. I felt it echoed the fragmentary way in which any outsider would experience island life – a series of sketches, photographs, and memories. A place observed, but only partially seen.
A really assured debut for an author I shall follow with interest.
Her life is changed by the arrival of two English anthropologists whose reports and transcriptions of local folklore are interwoven into the narrative. Their perspective offers a striking contrast to the actuality of island living. At the same time, the haunting presence of a stranded whale dominates the island’s physical and symbolic landscape. Dragged out to sea only to return, the whale, dark and decaying, has a broad and resonant metaphorical presence throughout the story.
O’Connor’s prose is rich, robust, and evocative, equally capable of rendering the great beauty and the ceaseless wearying roughness of the island. The islanders’ relationship to nature, symbiotic and vital, is wreathed in myths and legends to help them understand - and ceremonies which attempt to give them some agency over – its unpredictable impact on their lives. In turn the English visitors weave their own myths and legends around the often mundane and bleak realities of island life for much the same reasons.
When smirking salvage workers come to pick away the flesh of the whale to be used and sold as product, leaving the bones picked clean behind them, the harmonic lines of Manod’s narrative converge.
The tale is rendered in snatches, some a few pages, some a few lines, with extracts from recorded songs, stories, and observations of the anthropologists. I’ve seen a few reviews which cited this as a potential weakness, but I really responded to it. I felt it echoed the fragmentary way in which any outsider would experience island life – a series of sketches, photographs, and memories. A place observed, but only partially seen.
A really assured debut for an author I shall follow with interest.