Book review: A salty tale of rivalry and superstition

Garrett Carr’s earthy, witty novel The Boy from the Sea is narrated by the combined consciousness of an entire town. 

That would be Killybegs, in the 1970s and ’80s, when trawler fishing was just about the only thing that kept the wolf from the door. 

One rainy morning in 1973, the sturdy and stoical townsfolk are going about their salty business when something strange occurs. Mossy Quinn, a local oddball, walks into town with a baby wrapped in a towel.

“It’s a gift from the sea,” Mossy insists, claiming he rescued the child from a tinfoil-lined barrel that had floated in on the tide.

“The baby had startling black hair,” the narrator explains, “but there was no talk of fairies or spirit children in our town, you’d go to Galway if you were after that kind of thing.”

All the same, the child does appear to have come from nowhere, and soon superstitious locals are lighting candles in their windows and lining up to see and touch this miracle from the sea.

To everyone’s surprise, a hardy fisherman called Ambrose Bonnar takes a shine to the infant, and promptly adopts him. Brendan Bonnar will be his name.

This is mixed news for the Bonnars’ young son Declan, who experiences a sense of displacement he will never quite overcome.

The child’s arrival convinces Ambrose that he is intensely lucky: his consequent self-confidence will often prove misplaced. 

As for Christine, Ambrose’s wife, she loves Brendan like he’s her own, but faces opposition from her sister Phyllis and curmudgeonly father Eunan, who bitterly resent the arrival of this changeling. 

As the boy grows up, his strangeness does not reassure them.

His eyes “were like two raisins,” the narrator tells us, “they reflected no light”.

Brendan is a loner, who roams the bogs and hills; he has “an aura”, and is discovered giving blessings to superstitious locals.

“It’ll be alright,” he says, placing hands on needy shoulders, and a messianic craze takes hold that will do no one any good.

Declan and Brendan’s bitter rivalry is the engine of Carr’s plot, but some of the best writing describes Ambrose’s life at sea.

Things go well at first when he buys a 56-footer, the Christine Dawn, with his partner Tommy O’Gara. 

But when Tommy branches out with a giant Dutch trawler, Ambrose is left behind, a quaint relic in an increasingly industrial age.

The race to plunder the North Atlantic coincides with Ireland’s entry to the EEC, and soon French and Spanish trawlers are jostling with the Killybegs boats for quotas. 

Declan will eventually follow his father into this gruelling trade, and inherit his obsession with Fastnet rock.

The Boy from the Sea is very funny at times, and sharply observant. “Would you take a Kit-Kat?” Ambrose suavely asks Christine when they are clumsily courting. 

Christine’s father Eunan is a compellingly dislikable old stoat, who “mocked anything frivolous: placemats, dessert, having a lie-in, suffering from your nerves”.

Ambrose is ultimately a tragic character, too dreamy to be in business, and always more at home on sea than land.

There are more prosaic theories as to Brendan’s origins, which will emerge to cause chaos later, and the novel gets becalmed around two thirds of the way through, as we wait a little too long for a crisis we know is coming.

But life in a fishing town is brilliantly evoked, and there’s compassion aplenty, even for characters who scarcely deserve it.