A year of change

Reading Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall, you will become completely immersed in the beautiful, weathered coastal landscape of a Welsh island in 1938. This is a place where the wind whistles through the roof and the winter damp finds every corner. Its few inhabitants work very hard to make their living, but life is simple here—work is found in the sea, friends and family are nearby, and island stories and customs are handed down through generations.

Two people from the mainland appear on the shores one day, and Manod, the young main character, finds work with them. They are anthropologists, or trying to be; Manod serves as their island guide, introducing her family to them and allowing them to photograph and catalog artifacts of her and her neighbors’ lives. Manod begins to trust them, but the story ends with that trust in tatters.

This story is written in a plainspoken yet poetic narrative style I particularly love. There is a plot, but the book is mostly an exquisite picture of what it must have been like to live on that island. O’Connor doesn’t romanticize the harshness of island life, yet her descriptions draw out the salt-worn beauty of the place and its people’s culture. Snippets of Welsh language and conversation are sprinkled throughout, which increases the sense of otherworldliness. This is a work of fiction that contains what was clearly a lot of detailed research on O’Connor’s part, and the result is a slow-building, immersive journey through a year of change for the observant, vivid, and thoughtful Manod.