Mind Picker: How to Build a Boat

The currach’s skeleton of sally and hazel rods is in the middle of the workshop floor and it really does look alive, and the centre laths makes it look like a boat now, I will admit this, and I admit to feelings of excitement just looking at it, maybe a mixture of nerves and excitement, which are perhaps the same thing, and the vast expanse, all the huge space its frame is taking up,

it’s greater than all of us.

My favourite quote from author Elaine Feeney’s interview on the Booker website is: As for my fiction – I write what I know – and then I tell lies. In this spirit, How to Build a Boat is based on Feeney’s real life experience — of living in the west of Ireland during turbulent socio-political times, of having taught in an all-boys’ school, of raising a child with unique abilities (as per that interview: hyperlexia) — and as she has worked primarily as a poet, the best bits of her writing here represent a poetic insight into the human condition as well as a poet’s precision of language (I realise that I’ve chosen quotes that all have poetic line breaks, but it really doesn’t happen all that often). Yet: I don’t know if these disparate bits add up to a totally satisfying novel. The plotline (and its moral) was fairly predictable, I was not moved by the characters’ predicaments, and often, I found that Feeney was using this space as a soapbox (which I understand is what every novelist is ultimately doing, but there was little subtlety to it). This was a fine read, probably three and a half stars, but I’m not moved to round up.

The cathedral bell rang out fast.
Bell | bang | bell | bang
Half past the hour.
It knocked a start out of Jamie who was stood in line behind other boys in blazers and school bags clasped to them. A few leaves whipped up in the rusty gulley at the entrance and a bird perched on the head of a marble statue. A full-sized laminated picture of Jesus was nailed to the main door, his heart plucked out of his chest and rainbow shards of light shooting from him. This was new and it threw Jamie. He memorised it for tomorrow. Eoin warned him that there could be new things. He said not to panic if this happens. But Jamie preferred when Eoin said nothing. Saying not to panic was like telling him not to think of an elephant in a tutu.

As the novel opens, we learn that Jamie is being raised by single dad, Eoin — Jamie’s mother having died in childbirth when his parents were still teenagers — and as Jamie is neurodivergent in some way (from the interview: Feeney refuses to categorise his condition, “the not labelling was an important consideration”), Eoin has always been indulgent and overprotective, but now needs to relinquish some control as Jamie starts secondary school at the local all-boys Catholic college. Jamie is immediately bullied and overwhelmed, but is rescued by his English teacher, Tess — who had provided extra support for special needs students until that program was suddenly cut — and although Tess is under immense pressure in her home life, she has the knowledge and inclination to take a kid in need under her wing. Eventually, Jamie catches the attention of the new woodworking teacher, Tadhg, and with a kind of outsider, folksy wisdom, Tadgh recognises that the boy would benefit from redirecting his obsessive energies into working methodically with his hands. And when Tadgh learns that the math-minded boy dreams of building a perpetual motion machine (that in some quasi-mystical way would connect him with the mother he never knew), Tadgh directs Jamie in the building of a traditional Irish boat (a “currach”) that invokes the ancient concept of “meitheal” (communal effort: many others will join in on the building of this boat, and Jamie will ultimately find a place in the community). POV rotates between Jamie and Tess — with Tadgh serving as the link between their stories — and despite some barely developed background characters attempting to thwart their efforts (while demonstrating all that’s wrong in modern Irish society), the lives of these three were nicely developed.

Stood there, Tess thought about Tadhg walking out to the Forge, alone, about Jamie and his machine, about how fulfilled she was being among them and how naively Jamie was hoping, the bright hope he had, that the energy, wherever it would manifest from, would be enough to connect everyone, the living and the dead. But there was nothing for the half-living, Tess thought —

Nothing at all for the dead walking among them.

There were many things that I didn’t understand in this story: Why was it set from autumn of 2019 to spring of 2020 without any mention of the pandemic? Why would there be an implication that a student shouldn’t be left unchaperoned with the bombastically misogynistic President of the college if nothing ever comes of that? Why would this same President (who warns boys not to work on the boat, because working with one’s hands is “common”) have hired a woodworking teacher in the first place? Why did every main character have to have been raised by a single parent? On the other hand: I did like the experience of being inside Jamie’s and Tess’ heads; these are interesting and complicated characters navigating difficult lives — lives made more difficult by their own decisions and behaviour — and the characters (if not the plot) are worth the read.