The immersion in a long vanished world that Elizabeth O'Connor provides with Whale Fall proved to be the perfect distraction from current events, while still reminding me how distant politics can affect all of us, no matter how detached our lives from their reality.
A dead whale washes up on the shore of a tiny island off the coast of England between the two world wars, marking a change of seasons in the life of Manod, an intelligent and highly observant adolescent girl who already has rejected an implied marriage proposal. She resides in a cottage with a father who earns his living as a fisherman, the sole job available to men when they're not farming their land, and a wild child sister who speaks only the native tongue, Welsh. The girls have lost their mother to illness, a condition Manod hopes she can escape thanks to a world she has glimpsed through borrowed books. Theirs is a hard but not unhappy life, almost completely determined by the vagaries of nature.
A pair of British ethnographers with a camera and a recording device--neither of which Manod ever has seen--show up not long after the whale to study life on the island. They hire Manod to interpret for them, each with a different agenda that ultimately exploits their employee who naively takes them at their word. O'Connor superbly conveys both their charm and menace as she explores how research and technology can be misused.
A little heavy on metaphor, this lovely novel nonetheless tells a timeless coming-of-age story distinguished by its poetic close-ups of the natural world. I chose to read it because of my own experience with beached whales on Fire Island and O'Connor captures the unusual experience perfectly. Come to think of it, they could have been interpreted as metaphors, too.
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