THE BOY FROM THE SEA, Irish fable-making for this century's needs

THE BOY FROM THE SEA
GARRETT CARR
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 'Compulsive reading. Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment' Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

1973. In a close-knit community on Ireland’s west coast, a baby is found abandoned on the beach. Named Brendan Bonnar by Ambrose, the fisherman who adopts him, Brendan will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose, a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it’s a decision that will fracture his family and force him to try to understand himself and those he cares for.

Bookended by the arrival and departure of a single mesmerizing boy, Garrett Carr's The Boy From the Sea is an exploration of the ties that make us and bind us, as a family and community move irresistibly towards the future.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Funny thing how kindness skips a generation. Declan, the titular "Boy"'s older sibling, wouldn't know kindness if it fucked him. The elder Bonnar couple love their magical gift of a child..."Parents knew you can never tell how a child will turn out, naturally yours or not. They had learned, fundamentally, every child comes in from the sea, washes up against the ankles of their parents, arms outstretched, ready to be shaped by them but with some disposition already in place, deep-set and never quite knowable"...Brendan, named for the Navigator, that famously fostered child. The boy, like mythical Brendan, never has his own place to take root...thanks, Declan...but instead becomes a source of bemusement in the community.

The narrative is from a godlike omniscient third-person PoV...the godlike, or royal, "we." It's a choice that, while conferring the reader with the advantage of being privy to things a more limited PoV would make awkward to show, removes us from the action. Observing from a distance is always going to slow one down when reading about the intimate life of a community. It did here. There are so many small, mean-souled people in Brendan's world. It doesn't relent, either, when we see his "family"...mother Christine's horrifying sister and father, and unwilling sibling Declan...being so unreservedly awful to him. As though being abandoned in a Moses-like way was somehow his fault, or merited (like any infant deserves abandonment).

So quite a melancholy read for me. As I've come to expect from Irish writers, or the ones who get published in the US anyway, the prose has real lyricism. Unexpectedly it breaks into quotidian musings on things like the EU and its fishing quotas..."He still felt guilty about his comportment with Christine later, as he sat in his car outside the fisheries office. He’d never actually apologize but he’d be extra jovial in their next few encounters; this was how we indicated we were sorry for something we’d said or done: by acting oddly the next time we met you"...and the waning control of the church on peoples' inner lives..."A note on our use of the word ‘grand’ is here required. It might sound like a relative of good or great but in our usage it was something different. ‘Grand’ was how we acknowledged that something wasn’t good or great while also saying nothing could be done and there was no point going on about it"...and eldercare..."Eunan {Christine's ghastly father} was against anything without set purpose and complete predictability and a human tended to fail on these requirements. He was against surprises, he hadn’t allowed a telephone in the house for many years as you never knew when it might ring on you. He mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves. ‘Get away out of that!’ he’d shout at cream cakes and people with hay fever."

What you're getting in this story is not showy, or fast, or loud. It is just like the sea that dominates this Western Irish town. It is quiet and inner-directed, with wild outbursts of damage and trouble, followed by the calmer gift-giving phase again. It is a lovely, involving visit to a lifeway long since altered by the relentlessness of change grown from within anf imposed from without.

I very much enjoyed the story's two-decade time frame. They were the last years of an Ireland now so completely vanished that one would be hard pressed to see it in modern Ireland. An elegy, albeit an emotionally honest one, to the way the country once was, with characters standing in for ways old and new. A read I expect will launch the writer into world notice because it is so plangently plucking heartstrings all the way through.

I don't mean that as a diss, only a recognition. I'm hip to your tricks, Author Carr, and I see how well you're performing them. That earns you a respectful tip-of-the-cap four stars.