Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Garrett Carr’s first novel for adults is set in his hometown in County Donegal, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. One day in 1973, a baby in a barrel is found on the shore — as if it had come in with the tide. With the town aflutter about the mysterious arrival, a fisherman called Ambrose Bonnar convinces his wife Christine to adopt the baby and raise him alongside their son Declan.
The story follows the boy from the sea, whom they name Brendan, through childhood and adolescence until he leaves home. Invested with a spiritual quality by the villagers in light of his origins, he roams about bestowing “blessings”. Declan resents the intrusion from the start, disowning Brendan as his brother. The tension mirrors that between Christine and her sister, who begrudgingly cares for their ageing father.
The Boy from the Sea is told in a close first-person plural, with the townsfolk observing the family — a rare narrative perspective used most famously by Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides. Carr’s chorus is a charming and sometimes humorous voice, relaying the consensus of a group of middle-aged men who gather at the bar of the Ship Inn. Observing a fight between the brothers, “the term ‘passive aggressive’ hadn’t yet reached us”, they remark, “but the thing itself had”.
The novel follows The Rule of the Land, Carr’s 2017 memoir about walking and canoeing along Ireland’s border with the UK, and his books for children and young adults. Despite his background writing YA fiction, it is the adult characters, including Christine’s sister and father, who are more fully fleshed-out in The Boy from the Sea — which poignantly paints the struggles of marriage, caregiving, grief and financial worry.
Ambrose’s difficulties reflect the ups and downs of the fishing industry after Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973, which brought in catch quotas and foreign competition. A period of relative prosperity when he pairs his small boat with his friend Tommy’s is followed by hardship, while Tommy’s business flourishes with the well-timed purchase of a trawler. Aware of the Bonnars’ precarious position, saddled with a large mortgage amid “merciless” interest rates, the town pools together to make an anonymous cash donation in an envelope marked “from a friend”.
Ambrose grapples with his role as a father in a culture that prizes strong, silent types. Declan tries to connect with his father by taking up his trade despite his true passion for cooking. His attempts to impress his crewmates and family with his culinary skills go unappreciated. Flipping through a magazine one day, Declan is surprised to discover pictures of “new men” who “might talk about their feelings, cry and the like”.
“We hadn’t seen a new man in reality, they must’ve had them in England and certain parts of Dublin maybe,” the communal narrator notes. “They weren’t our sort of thing, but you may be assured if a new man had accidentally strayed into our town he would’ve been treated with respect.” Yet in a moment of grief, Tommy — touchingly — cries and expresses regret.
“Fishing communities haven’t really featured in Irish writing,” Carr recently told The Observer, which named him one of the best new novelists of the year. The Boy from the Sea articulates the experience of men “contained to the point of self-repression . . . preferring to look out at a wordless immensity than have even a second of introspection”.
It’s a refreshing perspective in a landscape of contemporary fiction written predominantly by women, about women and read by women. “Atlantic winds had whipped away our words until we learned to do without them,” Carr writes of the “hardy people” of Killybegs. Thankfully, his pub peanut gallery has chimed in to fill the silence.
The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr, Picador £16.99, 336 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
