About the Book
It is 1938 and for Manod, a young woman living on a remote island off the coast of Wales, the world looks ready to end just as she is trying to imagine a future for herself.
The ominous appearance of a beached whale on the island’s shore, and rumours of submarines circling beneath the waves, have villagers steeling themselves for what’s to come. Empty houses remind them of the men taken by the Great War, and of the difficulty of building a life in the island’s harsh, salt-stung landscape.
When two anthropologists from the mainland arrive, keen to study the island’s people, Manod sees in them a rare moment of opportunity to leave the island and discover the life she has been yearning for. But, as she guides them across the island’s cliffs, she becomes entangled in their relationship, and her imagined future begins to seem desperately out of reach.
Format: Hardcover (224 pages) Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 25th April 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
Shortlisted for the Winston Graham Historical Prize 2025, Whale Fall is a quietly seductive novel that immerses you in the life of a small, remote community. Even twenty years after the end of the First World War, the islanders are still living in its shadow. Many young men left the island to join up but never returned, either killed in action or because they have made a new life on the mainland. Remnants of the war – uniforms, helmets, fragments of naval mines – even still wash up on the shore.
Those that remain on the island scrape a living from traditional activities such as farming and fishing. The island, although beautiful, is a harsh environment in which to live especially when winter storms pummel its coastline and it is cut off from the mainland. The beached whale decaying on the shoreline seems a metaphor for the island’s decline.
Manod has spent her whole life on the island. Her father is a fisherman and the uncertain nature of his occupation means they lead a hand-to-mouth existence. Following the death of their mother, Manod has taken on the role of caring for her young sister. Although she is devoted to her, it’s something that ties her to the island leaving her increasingly frustrated that life is passing her by. Days unfold much as they always have. ‘Reverend Jones’s sermon took its usual path. Prosperous fishing must be prayed for, a trade with a proper godly life, then the shipping forecast for the coming week.’
Because of its remoteness, the outside world barely impinges on island life, until that is the prospect of war looms once again, as well as the arrival of two anthropologists, Joan and Edward, who want to study the islanders’ way of life. As one of the few English speakers on the island, Manod is employed to translate the stories they collect from the islanders. The relationship she forms with them leads her to believe this is the opportunity she has longed for: to make a new life for herself away from the island, to experience things she has only read about in books, and perhaps to find love.
Increasingly, though, she gains the impression they are not interested in portraying the reality of island life but some imagined, sanitised version they’d arrived at even before they set foot on the island. As she says to Joan, ‘The island that’s in your head. I don’t think it exists.’ Irritation at their dismissive attitudes, factual inaccuracies and staged photographs turns to disillusionment and, ultimately, a feeling of betrayal.
There is a haunting quality to Whale Fall in its depiction of a way of life slowly dying in the face of the intrusion of the modern world. I found the conflict Manod feels between her responsibilties and her quiet desperation for a more fulfilling life intensely moving.
In three words: Intimate, atmospheric, evocative
Try something similar: The Lost Lights of St Kilda by Elisabeth Gifford
About the Author
Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize in 2020. She has a Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Birmingham on the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Whale Fall is her first novel. (Photo: Instagram profile)
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