From a Low and Quiet Sea

Armoured they came from the east,
From a low and quiet sea.
We were a naked rabble, throwing stones;
They laughed, and slaughtered us.

The title of Donal Ryan's From a Low and Quiet Sea comes from the above poem (which a young character writes about the Norman invasion of Ireland for a school project), and something about this verse captures the vulnerability of men – that naked rabble – the pressures of masculinity and pain of the loss of love; for while it may essentially be true that, “Wives are easily found and daughters are easily made”, each of the three main characters in this book suffers the loss of their great loves, and are forced to soldier on. I was enchanted by Ryan's line-by-line writing, was deeply emotionally affected by the first two stories, but am left a bit ambivalent about the entire project; the fourth section and its effort to link everything together felt a bit forced and inorganic to me. I'm still left wanting to pick up Ryan's earlier books. (Beware unintended spoilers beyond; I've tried to be careful.)

The book begins with a father explaining to his daughter the interconnectedness of trees in a forest – how they communicate with each other through an underground fungal system, how they pass resources to one another – and concludes that the lessons we can learn from trees is to take a long view of history and be kind to one another. I suppose this justifies the ways in which Ryan connects the three parts of this book (in ways that take many years to play out) and it likely also explains why so many themes are repeated in each section: characters relating myths and fairytales and dreams; men and boys fronting a masculine persona when they're feeling emotionally vulnerable; and pulsing beside everything, the low and quiet sea and its promise of peace. In each section, it was writing about the sea that most delighted me, and which I'll quote in large chunks here.

The first section is Farouk's story: He is a Syrian doctor who makes the painful decision to flee across the sea with his wife and daughter as Islamist rebels capture his city. As he waits in a refugee camp to reunite with his family, Farouk is drawn to the sea:

And late one evening he walked from the camp to the water's edge and he stood beneath the smirking moon and looked out across the sea, and he wondered at the stillness of it, as though its breath were held, as though it were too ashamed to reveal anything of itself to him, to admit to the violence latent in it, to the things it held, and he stripped himself naked and he walked out into it, and when he was a good way out, past, it seemed, the twin promonitories that flanked the camp, the water still was only as far as his chest, and he lifted himself onto the surface of it and he struck out face-down for the empty horizon, and when he was sure he was far beyond his depth he flipped onto his back and looked at the long ragged tear of the galaxy, like a wound in the sky, weeping, and he exhaled and let his limbs fall still and he waited for the water to carry him down, and fill him, and slough his flesh and salt his guilty bones.

In the next section, we meet Lampy: A shiftless young man who lives with his Mam and his hilariously acid-tongued grandfather in small town Ireland. A minibus driver for a local seniors home, Lampy feels constrained by his family's attempts to keep treating him like a boy, but he knows he isn't man enough to break out on his own. Suffering a broken heart, Lampy has juvenile fantasies of driving his car into a bridge abutment (that'll show them all), and the sea plays a role in these fantasies as well:

He remembered a dream he'd had. About standing on Thomond Bridge, watching the water flowing black and fast and high, up from the city towards Thormondgate, the wrong way. He was looking at it, marvelling at the speed of it, the height of it, touching the ramparts of the bridge almost, and he was telling someone whom he couldn't see that this was normal, that the river was tidal as far as Curragower, that it was just a fast tide coming in, not to worry, and the bridge groaned and shook and collapsed into the water and the water was warm around him, and it carried him upstream past King's Island and over the salmon weirs, and the river rushed inland against itself, away from the sea, and he was laughing when he woke, and as the dream faded he thought how easy it would be to let himself be carried to his end. To close his eyes and fall.

The final story is that of John: We meet him as an old man, attempting to make a final confession. We learn that after losing his beloved older brother as a child, John became his parents' biggest disappointment and this turned him into a bully (he beat up the kid in school who wrote the title poem), and as an adult, he used these bullying skills to become a crooked lobbyist (of the sort who doomed Ireland to its 2008 financial crisis). As he recalls his long life, John remembers his one great love:

And that Saturday she came for a drive in my Jaguar and we walked along the beach in Lahinch and the breeze off the ocean was steady and cool, and she wore my jacket over her pink cardigan, and the jeans she was wearing were tight and they were frayed a little at her ankles and she'd taken off her shoes and was carrying them dangled by their straps and there was a thin gold chain on her left ankle and a tattoo of a silhouetted bird in flight, and the sun was low to the horizon and the sky was red and the ebbing tide was drawing out along the sand and lines of breakers stretched away to the curvature of the earth and there was no one on the beach but us, and I put my arm around her and drew her into me and kissed her, and there was salt on her lips from the breeze, and I drew her down onto the sand, and she kissed me hard back, then soft, and her sweet salty lips barely moved and I wished I could have died there on the sand.

I think I would have liked this slim book better if the fourth section hadn't attempted to show the connections between these characters – if Ryan had presented this as three short stories and left the reader to figure out if there were any connections – but I was happy to have spent a couple of hours in Ryan's world. I'd give 3.5 stars if I could, and am rounding down against the other Man Booker Prize nominees that I've read for 2018.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *