4 Stars
When I read Clear by Carys Davies and posted my review, a follower of my blog recommended Whale Fall because it also deals with life on an isolated island.
This novel is set in the last four months of 1938 on an island with a population of 47 off the Welsh coast. The narrator is 18-year-old Manod Llan who lives with her father and her younger sister Llinos. She spends her time helping her father, looking after her sister, and doing embroidery. When Edward and Joan, two English ethnographers, arrive to study and document the islanders’ lives, customs, and folklore, Manod is hired to translate for them and to transcribe interviews because she is fluent in English and Welsh. Manod is anxious to leave the island and she thinks that she might be able to go with them to the mainland after they’ve finished their field work, especially as they provide her with glimpses of life outside her small community.
Manod is a memorable character. Her intelligence is obvious, as is her love for her family. She is very attuned to the rhythms of island life; her descriptions show her awareness of both the beauty of the island and the hardships of life on that island. Marriage is what is expected of a young woman her age, but she is resistant to the idea and yearns to expand her horizons. She’d love to study at a university. However, her desire to escape is in conflict with her loyalty to home and obligation to look after Llinos.
Life on the island is disrupted by a whale that washes up on shore. That whale serves as an omen in many ways; it washes up just before the two unprincipled foreigners arrive. The rotting carcass is also a physical representation of the community’s death. I thought of Edward and Joan as scavengers picking at a decaying corpse.
When she first meets them, Manod admires Joan and Edward, but that admiration turns to disillusionment once she realizes that in their desire to write a compelling book and to advance their careers, they are writing a false narrative. Reading what the two write about the islanders, she comes to see their lack of understanding and their romanticization of life in an isolated community. For example, Edward and Joan have a fisherman, who cannot swim, go into rough water so they can have an action photograph for their book. Manod tells them that this not the way the island fishermen actually fish, but accuracy is not their concern. Instead of realistically writing about the culture on the island, they distort it. How they have betrayed her trust is obvious in Manod’s comment that “’The island that’s in your head. I don’t think it exists.’”
Both Joan and Edward are despicable. They are manipulators, liars, and thieves. Joan tells Manod that she must study at university but then does nothing to help her. Then there’s her use of Manod’s embroidery! She is so patronizing: “Often my conversations with Joan went that way: me telling her something she did not know before, her arguing with it.” Edward is no better: when Manod explains that during World War I, all the men had to leave to fight and the women were left to farm and fish themselves, Edward laughs and comments, “’Like Lesbos . . . Sounds idyllic.’” In his behaviour towards Manod, Edward is just weaselly. His comments about dresses are just cringy!
The writing style is lyrical but understated. Dialogue is spare. It is the precise, evocative language that is beautiful in its simplicity. Visual imagery abounds: “rust-sick boats” and a filthy and grey sea “covered in a horrible yellow foam” and rocks “covered in white lichen, its fronds shaped like minuscule hands” and “whole crowds of crabs scuttled in, washes of red and green. In the cliffs, the gorse grew thick with copper heather and white butterflies. The cow parsley curled brown.”
This is a quiet, understated book but it’s definitely memorable.
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