12. Elizabeth O'Connor, Whale Fall (2024) (6/4/25)
This is a quiet gem of a book, set in the last few months of 1938 on a small (three miles long) island off the coast of Wales, inhabited by twelve families—fifteen men, twenty women, twelve children. They make their livelihoods from fishing, raise what they need otherwise. The mainland is a five-hour row, on a fair day, so these people do not just "pop down to the village" to provision up. Young people have begun leaving the island, to find a life with more opportunity. Our protagonist, Manod, is eighteen, and she, too, is eyeing the mainland with curiosity.
The book begins (I've abbreviated):
Here is an island year. First the sun, and first the spring growing fat with birds. They leave the island to its grey winter and return when shoots appear in the ground. Auks come as dark shapes under the water. Kittiwakes and gannets fall from the skies. We not notice them at first. . . . In summer, the women of the island repaint the houses white. They go into the limestone cave at the west of the island and chip the rock into powder. . . . After summer, the cold circles, the drops like a stone. The birds disappear one by one. They leave their nests on the cliffs with eggs still inside. In autumn, the sea boils like a bot on the fire. The birds pass and the summer is gone. Winter: we stay near the hearth, sleep in the same bed. The sea sidles up to the door, laps at the edge of the island. . . . At Christmas we cook a catch of fish, then butcher a sheep, and throw it into the water. The waves push it back onto the beach again by spring, and the birds arrive to devour it. The sheep are rotated around the island, after they've grazed their field to nothing.
So we have the circle of life. The next chapter begins, "The whale became stranded in the shallows of the island overnight, appearing from the water like a cat slinking under a door." And thus the overarching metaphor of the book arrives: the whale, which fascinates the locals as it dies, disappears into the water, then reappears on the other side of the island and slowly decomposes, but not before, eventually, it is salvaged—oil and blubber for fuel, skin and organs for dog meat and fertilizer. It also draws a pair of outsiders, university students, Edward and Joan—English—who wish to study the islanders. Manod, who has taught herself English, is hired on to help, writing and translating.
The book is written in short segments, some narrative about Manod's life in Rose Cottage with her father and younger sister (the mother is a ghostly thread in the telling); some ethnographic—Joan or Edward's diary entries, or collected folk tales or songs. The evocation of nature is splendid, and of the hard life that the islanders live.
Edward and Joan, of course, have their own take on what they encounter, both romanticized and intellectualized. A conversation between Joan and Manon exemplifies this:
The clouds at the edge of the water had begun to turn a dark grey. The boats were on the main stretch of water below the cliffs, coming in.
'I think there is a storm coming,' I said. 'We should head back.'
She looked out. 'How do you know? The water is still.'
I heard a curlew wheel in the grass behind us.
'Some of the older generations believe the curlews cry when a storm is coming. It's an omen that someone will die at sea.'
Joan studied the grass.
'Probably a change in air pressure makes them call. A change in their territory. Wouldn't you say?'
I didn't reply. Often my conversations with Joan went that way: me telling her something she did not know before, her arguing with it.
The book ends with a festival, Mari Lwyd, which involves horse-head skeletons—and as things turn out, that whale's head as well. Joan and Edward leave before the event—though Manod had, naively, understood that she would be going with them, to the mainland, to university to study. Even though they abandon her, their visit has, we believe, changed her life.
When I typed in simply "whale fall," looking for an image of the book cover, I came up instead with articles on "the process where a dead whale sinks to the deep-sea floor, providing a concentrated food source and creating a unique ecosystem for years." Also part of the book's metaphor—because eventually that ecosystem becomes played out, just as this island seems to be losing its ability to provide. In an appendix, O'Connor mentions four islands, off of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, that she in part based her fictional island on, all of which have, "over the last two centuries, seen declining populations, increasingly harsh weather, the sale of land to private owners, and younger generations moving to the mainland." It reminded me of a community in the far north of Norway that we visited two years ago, which was evacuated by the government some decades ago. Too harsh, too expensive to maintain services. It makes "sense," but imagine all the broken hearts.
P.S. Two days after I finished this book, we were walking near a big field that's the staging area for the Big Sur Marathon and other events, and it was full of studio trucks and trailers. We asked one fellow what they were working on. "A feature named Whale Fall" came the response. What?!? It must be the same story—it's such an unusual title. It will be interesting to see how they transform central California into a windswept Welsh island. They're shooting the whale scene on Monday at a local beach. We might just have to go for an early dog walk on Monday, see what we see. I love coincidences like this!
P.P.S. Ha ha ha, the joke was on me! Yes, they are shooting a movie called Whalefall (one word), but no, it's not about an isolated fishing community as war approaches. Starring Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin, it "follows a scuba diver who, while looking for his father's remains, is swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has just one hour to get out before his oxygen runs out." We might have to go check it out anyway. Just for the fun of it.
