If the west of Ireland is a state of mind, Donegal is its subconscious, sometimes attended to and sometimes not, but always present. The journey from Bundoran to Malin Head has the air of the last quarter of a closing day, the intimate variety of the county’s speech and people murmured in low tones.
This is a community that has a deep voice in literature, storytelling and music, in the poetry and prose of Moya Cannon and Alan Murrin, and in the folklore of Lillis Ó Laoire, who has trawled the cold sea for Irish-language songs in transit to the western isles of Scotland. In film too there is Loic Jourdain’s beautiful A Turning Tide in the Life of Man, a hymn to those Donegal fishermen who witnessed the stripping of Irish waters by the European fleet.
Now we have Garrett Carr’s first novel, The Boy from the Sea, which is set in Killybegs, Ireland’s big fishing port. Sheltered in a bay that opens into the North Atlantic, everything about the book and its characters is shaped by the ocean. The Boy from the Sea inhabits a transitional world, the rigours of church and family loosening before the constant wind. This Atlantic is a panorama of light and shade that shapes its subjects with unrelenting force, in response to which words have limited purchase.
So we have the boy from the sea, a child with no story, and no family until he is given the name Brendan and adopted by Christine and Ambrose Bonnar, who already have Declan, a small boy of their own. Together they navigate the contours of a community anchored on a sole certainty, the unforgiving nature of the sea, which dominates the book and has something of the presence of a god, bountiful and jealous. It shapes every fact of life, from Brendan’s strange arrival to the low slung shape of the bungalows that hide in hillsides from the salt air.
The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr: Wry, observant, various and thoughtful, this novel does something only art can
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Part of Carr’s story is its slow defeat by technology, the larger steel-framed fishing vessels capable of surviving what the previous wooden boats could not. With this comes an increase in catch, and the devastation of Ireland’s territorial fisheries is a dark rumble in the novel’s background. Against this, Ambrose Bonnar is a romantic of the old ways and suffers for it, his refusal to bend to fishing as an industry his undoing.
Ambrose has a wildness that is of a kind with Kevin Barry’s characters. Carr has an eye for the movement of Ambrose’s body, the fisherman’s skill on the deck like a dancer, practised to the point of thoughtlessness and never to be celebrated but for a slagging. This is John McGahern’s world run off to sea, or Dermot Healy’s with less Sligo introspection.
The Boy from the Sea is that unusual thing, a novel that gathers its predecessors in altered context. It is northern writing in the broadest sense, the Atlantic a frame in which the island of Ireland takes different shape, the prose line from Mayo to Sligo and on to Donegal and Antrim the horizon of a literature whose concerns are for community and survival. Brendan is its strange apostle and Declan its doubting Thomas, the foundling and the firstborn in constant struggle until the novel’s close.
Killybegs is a stage for both, and Carr draws the local characters and their quirks with an affectionate humour that carries the novel through its various devastations. Both boys soon realise, however, that the roles they have to choose from are limited, and dictated by the slow time of generations past, to which each new generation surrenders, often from the slow wearing down that bears the name of pragmatism.
The quiet ghosts of this book are the Donegal people who left for Scotland and England, sometimes seasonally, frequently forever. Estranged in their accents, they come back for the brief buzz of funerals and are gone. In this they are like the fishermen who have two lives, one onshore and one off, the family livingroom and the trawler’s bridge two social spaces in which to gather. Carr finds drama throughout, and has a kind ear whatever the setting, his characters at ease with themselves, if not with each other.
Christine Bonnar is the character on which all these tensions press, and her journey through the novel is beautifully observed. The claustrophobia of family relations proceeds from a sense of the world as a place of disappointment. The small tyrannies of obligation acquire the raiment of filial feeling, smothered in the language of sentimentality. Carr speaks the truth of these relationships through a narrator whose soft ironies dress the consequent tragedies of the book in understatements true to the place and its people.
It takes The Boy from the Sea a few pages to find its voice and the opening scenes of Brendan’s discovery jar a little with the social dramas that follow. The apparent credulity of local people in accepting reality as mystery shows itself to be something different, and darker, later. Still, the novel does something only art can, which is to show how more than one truth might be held in mind at once, even if together they conflict. That facility is of a kind with life in Donegal, a place of quiet dreams not given to the religious manias of Ballinspittle further south. If no Madonna moved in Killybegs, its people did, and The Boy from the Sea ends with a picture of Ireland on the verge of change.
Both Declan and Brendan find a way forward, even as the price their family pays for it registers in the novel’s unrelenting style. The Boy from the Sea is a new northern novel, wry, observant, various and thoughtful, a book that gathers momentum like a westerly, the crash of consequences giving way to a late calm, the reader left with a stunned impression of the storm that just blew over, Donegal returned to its big, open sky.
Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and the Baldwin Professor in the Humanities at the University of Georgia. His latest book is Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford University Press).
