In 1938, the remote Welsh island where Elizabeth O'Connor's Whale Fall takes place is floundering. The climate is changing, forcing the local fishing community to confront treacherous tides and a shrinking catch. Young people are departing for factory jobs on the mainland. Eighteen-year-old Manod, who has completed the meager education available to islanders, has only two options: leave or get married. Unable to choose, she remains in limbo, keeping house for her surly father and trying to manage her wild younger sister, Llinos.
When two English anthropologists, Joan and Edward, arrive to conduct an ethnography of island life, Manod jumps at the chance to become their guide and translator. But as she becomes infatuated with the outsiders, sinister undertones in their work emerge: Joan, a member of England's growing fascist faction, is seeking accounts of "uncorrupted" rural life to bolster her nationalist ideology. In her debut novel, O'Connor sets herself the intriguing challenge of communicating the dangers of Joan's revanchist beliefs through a narrator with no political consciousness—in other words, to write a novel that scarcely mentions politics but illustrates fascism's dangers for the very communities it claims to valorize.
Readers of British literature (or watchers of The Crown) will be able to sniff out Joan's social and political background easily. A rare female graduate of Oxford, she speaks with an arch, Bloomsbury Group lilt and chuckles when Manod asks if she can cook. ("We always had staff for that.") Waxing eloquent about the "honest" nature of island life, she describes how her father cultivated orchards on her family's (presumably extensive) estate: "He truly understood the need for preserving woodland, the English landscape." That scene of pastoral luxury recalls Mr. Ramsey pacing his grounds in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse—and, when retold in Manod's cramped cottage, seems shockingly un-self-aware.
In the years before WWII, many members of Joan's milieu were full-throated supporters of fascism. The Duke of Windsor, brother of England's king, famously toured Hitler's Germany in 1937. Oswald Mosley, the pedigreed leader of the British Union of Fascists, led paramilitary marches through the streets of London. A key part of this ideology was a romantic concept of agrarian living that elided its many hardships and inequalities—an attitude that allows Joan to uncritically accept her own class privileges.
Manod doesn't know any of this—how could she? Because the novel unfolds largely in her voice, it contains few explicit allusions to fascism. Instead, O'Connor explores the political underpinnings of Joan's work by contrasting her representation of island life with Manod's.
A painstakingly accurate narrator, Manod relates both the pride her father takes in his work and the isolation that caused her mother to commit suicide. She's especially detailed in her descriptions of island labor, noting each step in the tricky process of gathering birds' eggs with Llinos: "I held her calves down as she wriggled on her stomach to the cliff-edge, and reached down to the nests along the top crags." Exploring a house abandoned by a departing family, she meticulously catalogs the overgrowth: "Bats, wasps, moss, mould. Five different kinds of knotweed."
The anthropologists' field notes and behavior paint a different picture. Excerpts from their diaries, which punctuate Manod's narrations, tend to emphasize the islanders' backwardness through descriptions of their bad teeth and antiquated dress. Simultaneously, Joan idealizes the most grueling aspects of island life, noting the "balletic" movements of the fishermen and enthusing about "the strength and guile of our countrymen, from all corners of the Isles."
In addition to this remarkable lack of specificity, Joan's depictions of island life are often patently false. When Manod leafs through the anthropologists' notebooks, she sees references to animals that don't live on the island and photographs of unrelated villagers described as members of a family. Manod eventually breaks with Joan after she arranges a bizarre photoshoot with a local fisherman, asking him to pose in a dangerous cove and pretend to catch fish with his bare hands.
Confronted about her inaccuracies, Joan presents herself as a champion of island life, even telling Manod she doesn't appreciate what she has. But Joan's refusal to see that life as it is allows her to romanticize a rigid class system that keeps islanders at the bottom while benefiting upper-crust Brits like her—and justifies turning to fascism to protect those privileges. When Edward finally tells Manod that Joan is "one of Mosley's" (one of the only direct references to her politics) the news comes as more of a confirmation than a revelation.
Today, calls to return to "traditional" ways of life are familiar fare from legislators, clergy, and even influencers. Whale Fall brought to mind the "trad wife" videos that often populate my feeds—gauzy, idealized depictions of the hard work of homemaking that proselytize a gendered division of labor. Much like Joan's field notes, such videos express admiration for a certain lifestyle in order to mask a rigid and unequal social vision. O'Connor's depiction of this political ploy as it manifested in the twentieth century also contains a prescriptive for the twenty-first: Careful precision in the way we observe and relate our own experiences. Joan may have wealth, resources, and education on her side, but nothing is more effective at countering her malignant philosophy than Manod's quiet evocation of her very own life.
FICTION
Whale Fall
By Elizabeth O'Connor
Pantheon Books
Published May 7, 2024
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