Whale Fall, Elizabeth O’Connor

I listened to this on audiobook, which is a great way to do it, because you get the wonderful texture of the accent, and bits of Welsh, and most importantly — you get to actually hear the snippets of songs, which are incredible.

I don’t know if you, like me, have occasional geographically specific reading desires — a craving to read fiction set in particular climates or milieus — but if you’re wanting a story about a fishing community on a rugged island, this will scratch that itch perfectly. It is also a novel about 20th century anthropologists being problematic, and though that’s a fairly well-trod path, Whale Fall offers an especially complex and interesting version of it, focusing on the ‘native’ informants and their ambivalent attachments to their ‘authentic’ culture. It is, of course, offering its own thick description of that culture, implicitly demonstrating literature’s power to do them justice. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it deploys the literary technique of the fragmentary narrative, but it does coalesce into a broader plot arc, and there is a strong sense of embeddedness in local culture. This is ironic, because the island is a fiction — an amalgamation of different parts of the Celtic fringe. Nice bit of meta-meta commentary there.

But in all this talk about what makes the book so cool conceptually, I’ve skipped over what really makes it work, which is the very specific and compelling sense of voice and character. It’s such a vivid evocation of various personalities in all their flaws and idiosyncracies, but it does so in a sparing and utterly unsentimental way. I really enjoyed it.