On a battered beach, a young woman comes of age in ‘exquisite’ ‘Whale Fall’

The year is 1938 in “Whale Fall” and a whale has washed ashore on a remote island off the coast of Wales. It’s September, lobster season. The boats are “half-rotten and covered over with barnacles, the nets flopping over the sides like tongues.”

A month later, two other foreign bodies make land, this time in the form of Joan and Edward, English ethnographers who heard about the whale while visiting a mainland pub. They are hoping to study the island’s culture so they can share its stories. For 18-year-old Manod, whose birth certificate reads 10 days later than her actual birthdate because a January storm prevented her father from taking a boat to the registration office, the arrival of both the whale and professors sparks an awareness of life beyond cottages with guano-stained roofs and winters spent huddled around the hearth.

A minister tells the ethnographers that the island population stands at 15 men, 20 women and 12 children. That’s slim pickings when it comes to finding a translator. Manod speaks English, is naturally curious and is eager to help. So, she sets to work with Joan and Edward, while continuing to care for her younger sister and run the home they share with their widower father.

A friendship develops between Manod and the professors, in the unequal way that a young woman from a land-out-of-time can be friends with people who are older and talk of Oxford and Paris. Manod sings folk songs into their recording machine and encourages other villagers to do the same. As a sign of appreciation, Joan gives Manod a tube of lipstick. Edward shows an even greater interest and encourages Manod’s burgeoning wanderlust, telling her she would thrive on the mainland. He also confides that Joan is a follower of a political ideology that troubles him. Talk about triangulation.

I’m not going to tell you if Manod leaves the island. What I will say is that Elizabeth O’Connor’s novel is an exquisite coming-of-age story, a beautifully crafted debut that plays with form — white space, fragments, transcripts, ethnographers’ notes — to create a nuanced account not only of Manod’s realization that there is a downside to Joan and Edward’s interest in her community but also of a place that is defined by its harsh conditions. Death is never far away. Its stench, like the rotting whale flesh that sways with the tides, is the aroma of her young life.

O’Connor doesn’t romanticize island life, although she is a master at describing her setting, a made-up place inspired by several islands that surround the British Isles. The reader understands that modernity will eventually have its way with this community and that, like the whale, it is an engendered species.

“There were more empty houses on the island than inhabited ones, left behind by families who had gone to the mainland,” O’Connor writes. “There were swifts nesting in the roofs, which had buckled inwards. Bats, wasps, moss, mold. Five different kinds of knotweed.”

Still, “Whale Fall” is not simply a eulogy. It’s the story of a young woman learning to think for herself.

Elizabeth Foy Larsen is the author of “111 Places in the Twin Cities That You Must Not Miss.”

Whale Fall

By: Elizabeth O’Connor.

Publisher: Pantheon, 224 pages, $27.