Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor is a short novel that has the tense, compressed energy of a short story as it builds to an unexpected conclusion. Set on a small island off the coast of Great Britain in the time just before the Second World War, where men make their living as fishermen and women bear children and manage households, Whale Fall gives us an intimate view of lives ruled by the unpredictability of the sea. Eighteen-year-old Manod shoulders a woman's burdens after the mysterious drowning of her mother, raising her feral younger sister, cooking and managing the household as well as helping her father. Though England is visible on clear days, it is as distant and unavailable as a dream in this harsh and isolated existence. Manod tells us,

"I'd seen girls married at sixteen, with children by twenty, widowed by the sea by twenty-five, worn out and lost" (78).

It is a future she is reluctant to step into.

When two English social scientists arrive to document island customs, they hire Manod because she is one of the few in this Welsh speaking community fluent in English. But along with the rewards of her work come the inevitable disruptions as she views what were heretofore unimagined possibilities of a lifestyle of study and scholarship on the mainland.

That year, there is a third unexpected visitor to the island, a whale that gets stranded in the shallows and then dies on their beach. Its body is a spectacle that attracts the villagers, but when it starts to smell, it is of interest only to Manod and the children of the island. As Manod observes its slow decomposition, it becomes a marker of time passing. And yet, it's such a powerful presence in this short novel, I believe its role is larger than that.

Certainly, it's a mysterious creature; its breathtaking size alone inspires awe. The armies of creatures that feed on its decaying body inspire fear in the watchers. It's immobile, yet changing, like a house or a garden seen through the seasons. This, I believe, is the quality that O'Connor so effectively makes use of. Its immobility serves as a grounding device for her readers and our perceptive, first person narrator, Manod.

I'm thinking that novels, which tend to be about movement and fluidity, need the grounding that some kind of fixed entity provides. As the whale appears throughout this one, I could feel how its stability contrasted with the disruptions to Manod's life caused by the English, sharpening and focusing their effect on her. The whale is as unknowable as the future that beckons Manod from across the water, and in one of the whale scenes, we see that only the children, and especially Manod's younger sister, Llinos, appreciate its mythic status:

"Most of the whale's fat had by now been eaten by birds and small fish in the water. Of the skin that was left, there were pockmarks and large scratches. For a long time the children had pretended the body was a beached submarine, collecting driftwood to act as weapons against imaginary traitors inside, but now the tough black skin had retreated from the bones the game had lost its appeal.

"The children brought flowers and grasses and placed them around the body. They held their faces in the crook of their elbows against the smell. One of the children, Cadoc, was dared to place them over the whale's cavernous head, but something cried out as he did so, and it startled him, so the flowers ended up lower down, over the whale's nose. Most of the children laughed and ran away. Llinos stayed, picked up the flowers, and moved them to where they were supposed to be. Over the days the whale turned paler, its skin tightening and coming away from the body, as if disappearing into the new-season light" (104).

The blend of primitive animal worship and respect towards nature that this visitor from the beyond inspires in the island's children alerts us to everything that Manod observes. Slowly stripped of its rotting flesh, the whale is an image that haunts these pages, pushing Manod towards a decision. Was her mother's death a suicide? Would Manod be yet another victim of island life? Both the whale and the English visitors give her different information, pushing her towards the decision she must make about her future. Wisely, on O'Connor’s part, it is unexpressed until Manod has made her choice.

O'Connor, Elizabeth. Whale Fall. New York: Pantheon, 2024.

Filed under: Creating an unmoving presence at the center of a novel