Whale Fall
by Elizabeth O’Connor
debut novel
Interview by Ellen Birkett Morris
Elizabeth O’Connor’s beautifully stark debut novel Whale Fall is set on a remote Welsh Island in the fall of 1938. Life there is challenging, marked by the hard work of fishing and getting enough to eat and punctuated by fishermen drowning at sea and people deciding to leave for a better life on the mainland. The protagonist, Manod, an educated young women whose mother has died, longs for a different life, but is bound to the island by her younger sister who she is raising. A whale washes ashore leaving residents speculating if its arrival is an omen. The arrival of a couple, who are ethnographers and hire Manod to translate, causes Manod to reexamine her home and her place in the world. O’Connor discusses the writing of Whale Fall:
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?
O’CONNOR: Writing Whale Fall was actually quite a solitary experience! I didn’t know any other writers, and feel as though I spent as much time working out how to write as I did actually writing. I have always read a lot, and I started reading with a critical eye, trying to work out how different authors created different things. Then I really trusted in a Toni Morrison quote I’d read about being open, trusting that things – writing, plot-points, expressions, solutions – would appear to me. She became a kind of distant mentor.
AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Whale Fall come from?
O’CONNOR: I like the idea of a single image as a starting off point; for me it was a bit more of tangle of different threads.
Sometime in 2017, I heard a conference talk about whale strandings on a small island off the coast of Canada, by a historian who was studying the effects this had on the tiny, isolated community that lived there, and their changing relationship to the landscape they inhabited. I found it really captivating, hearing about this intersection of human and animal worlds and the way an ecological event could inspire a series of cultural changes changing the way people on the island, who were usually farmers and fishermen, told stories, the kind of folklore and imagery they connected with, the crafts and visual art the produced, and how they defined themselves as islanders.
I also had a family connection to people who live with the sea and shore: my grandfather was from the Dingle Peninsula, and my grandmother from a family of fishermen in a tiny coastal village in North Wales. I started to think about their lives, particularly as both had moved to English cities for a better life during the Second World War. In thinking about islands, whales, folklore, as well as what it would have been like for my grandparents to leave these places for a mythical mainland or city, I found the story of Whale Fall.
AUTHORLINK: What, if any, writers influenced your approach to telling this story?
O’CONNOR: I love writers that tell seemingly simple stories, with a lot of hidden depth. Claire Keegan and Amina Cain were both big influences on my approach to telling the story. I am also drawn to writers who are really detail-orientated, and who can write beautifully about the emotional resonance of particular objects; I keep returning to Liz Berry’s verse novel ‘The Home Child’ for this.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your choice to have Manod narrate the novel. How did she come to you?
O’CONNOR: This is a great question, as the narrator changed a few times while I was writing. I tried the novel with an omniscient, 3rd-person narrative voice, but it felt too impersonal. In one draft it was Llinos, Manod’s younger sister, who narrated. But I felt Manod offered something interesting; somebody who was both knowing and naïve, less clear-sighted than she thought she was, who was caught between different worlds. I wanted the shoreline landscape to infuse the novel, and in the same way the shore is not-land, but also not-water, Manod is both part of the island’s rich past and its disappearing future, ambitious and held by domestic obligation, using and being used by the visitors.
AUTHORLINK: How is Manod able to serve as a bridge in regards to the life of the islanders as she communicates with the ethnographers, Edward and Joan?
O’CONNOR: Manod speaks Welsh, specifically the island dialect of Welsh spoken on the island. Many of the islanders don’t speak English, so the translators need Manod quite practically to communicate with them. Manod also offers them a lot of local knowledge, about the flowers and plants of the island, about local custom and tradition, and serves as an introduction to many people on the island.
AUTHORLINK: The folktales and songs add an extra resonance to a novel that already seems touched by myth. Are they authentic? If so, can you tell me about the research you did in gathering those songs and stories?
O’CONNOR: I really loved putting together the folk tales and songs! The music all based on real folk songs I knew from family, but I adapted the lyrics to suit the narrative of the novel. Sometimes this was in the lyrical content and sometimes their repetitive or rhyming structure. Many of them can be heard and read in the online archives of St. Fagan’s museum, Cardiff. Same with the folk tales, though I also looked at folk tales from Cornwall and the Hebridean islands, to see where there were connections with Welsh stories.
I also did a lot of research into anthropological research practices and recording of folk songsand stories, such as in the memoir Adventures of a Ballad Hunter by John A. Lomax (1947). The research at the heart of this memoir took place mostly in the Southern states of the U.S. in the early twentieth century, but was the closest source I could find for the kind of practices and equipment that might have been used.
AUTHORLINK: How is Manod changed by her time with Edward and Joan?
O’CONNOR: I think Manod is really changed by it, in both negative and positive ways. She definitely learns something about her own naivety, and that she cannot easily trust people’s words and appearances as they are. But I also think it strengthens her resolve to make something different of her life, and to strive for a better life for her sister, too.
AUTHORLINK: Your setting is very particular. Is the island a haunted place or places, a jumping off point, or something else?
O’CONNOR: A bit of all! My jumping off point was wanting to write about the islands that orbit the coast of British isles, some of which were either formally evacuated or became uninhabited in the first half of the twentieth century, or that drew a lot of anthropological attention in the same period (Aran islands). To build up the world of the island, I read memoirs by people who had lived on Bardsey Island (Wales, not evacuated but mostly uninhabited by around 1960), St. Kilda (Scotland, evacuated 1930), the Blasket Islands (Ireland, evacuated 1953) the Aran Islands (Ireland, not uninhabited/evacuated but featured in a few complicated popular culture sources about islands). In this research, there were familiar themes of isolation, mythologizing of the mainland and larger cities, ambition, living alongside nature, and a sense of a way of life disappearing over time. In this, I also think of the island as a haunted place or places. In the way that many of the islands I was researching underwent significant changes in landscape and weather conditions, I also wanted to think about the island as a stage for playing out our own anxieties around climate, the way nature now symbolises to us a sense of alienation and loss.
AUTHORLINK: Your depiction of the setting is vivid, evocative, and multilayered. Can you offer advice to other writers on how to portray setting effectively?
O’CONNOR: Thank you! I’m really interested in how the physical qualities of a place reflect the way people live there, and the way it is perceived. I think the best way to portray a place is to be thinking about the space and the interrelations between these things. In Whale Fall, I had these real-life islands mentioned in the answer above as my literal and material models, but I also wanted to think about the island as a cultural setting. Islands often symbolize a kind of instability and changeability, due to the fact that their coastlines are often changing, being eroded, and that people are often arriving and leaving. Island communities are often isolated or have a kind of insularity, so that gives an island a particular kind of idiosyncratic culture too. So I was trying to portray a particular place, but also these cultural layers, and what it might mean to be an ‘islander’.
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing Whale Fall?
O’CONNOR: I always struggle with plot. It was the greatest challenge with Whale Fall and continues to be challenging with my second novel! I’m drawn to writing quite subtle, ‘nothing happens’ stories and structuring is a delicate operation. I also have complicated feelings about the classic three-act structure as both a reader and a writer, and don’t like to follow one too closely. Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ essay is a guiding light for me, especially as someone interested in writing about women, nature, and where they intersect.
What advice you offer to apprentice writers about either craft, or staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both?
O’CONNOR: I still need to take this advice, but staying encouraged in the face of rejection is definitely important. Failure, too – I’m learning that failure makes way for discovery, and that it’s not just inevitable but necessary.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
O’CONNOR: I am currently working on my second novel. I wrote some short stories about the world of dog shows, and found I wanted to return to it. I liked how surreal it was, and how it made me look at human relationships with animals and nature in a completely new way. There’s something in that extreme domestication I find really interesting. I’m still figuring out exactly what that story looks like, but I’m enjoying thinking about dogs all day and calling it ‘work’!
Elizabeth O’Connor’s short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specializing in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Whale Fall is her first novel.
