Sunday Books & Culture - "The Boy from the Sea"
THE BOY FROM THE SEA
by Garrett Carr
Published by Knopf (May 13, 2025)
Paperback $18.30
Audiobook $14.25
Reviewed by Penny A Parrish
When you read a book about Ireland, by an Irish writer, the Land itself will always be a major character. So it is in this gentle, loving book.
We begin in 1973 when a baby boy washes up on the stony beach of Killybegs on Donegal Bay. He was found by Mossy Shovlin in a blue plastic barrel cut in half, “lined with tinfoil, probably some kind of insulation, and the ballast proved to be a small concrete slab with a blanket folded over it. On top of that was the baby, pink, eyes wide to the grey sky, well-wrapped.” As the local priest noted, similar to baby Moses. Someone in this fishing village needed to take the orphan home, and that person was Ambrose Bonnar.
Ambrose and his wife Christine already have a child – two-year-old Declan, who, upon seeing the newborn, asks “Why.” He continues to ask that question for years, refusing to accept the baby Brendan, as his brother. While the Bonnars deal with the new addition, they also deal with the reality and difficulties of making a living through fishing. Adding to this situation is the rift between Christine and her sister Phyllis, who is the caregiver for their grumpy ailing father, Eunan. It’s a multi-generational family with ongoing issues.
The power of this novel lies in the narrator, an omniscient townsperson who fills in events both large and small. “The season turned. The funfair came and went, our children went back to school and we got over the Christmas.”
Chapters begin like this, and we hear that so-and-so was taken to the hospital. Or someone’s house was flooded and the carpet ruined.
Over almost two decades we watch the boys’ continued estrangement, the mother forced into a cleaning job to feed her family, the men, like Ambrose, unable to share emotions to help anyone through the pain. “These 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.”
This is the language of the book, when there were no cell phones, no social media. When people in small villages took care of each other yet spread gossip that tore friendships apart. The author’s description of the fishing fleet and the way men toiled on the ships is detailed and highlights the power and the fickleness of the ocean. It is a rugged, mean way of life.
This is a book to savor slowly, to mark passages where the words almost transcend their meaning. It is, simply put, beautiful.
Penny A Parrish is a local writer and photographer. See her pictures at her website.
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