Rural Irish lad’s world on uneven keel

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This article was published 18/11/2023 (686 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jamie O’Neil needs to build a boat. Why? Because he wants to connect with his dead mother, who died when he was born.

To do that, he figures he needs to create a perpetual motion machine; because a boat is constantly interacting with water, it seems as close as he will be able to get to such a device.

How to Build a Boat is Irish author Elaine Feeney’s second novel. Feeney’s writing style is compelling, although it might be challenging to some — she says she’s opposed to the traditional novel’s sense of a linear narrative with a start and an end, the third-person narrator and everything coming to a resolution at the book’s end.

Jamie is a very bright 13-year-old in his Catholic boys’ school in rural Ireland, where other students are as much of a mystery to him as he is to them. While it’s not named as such in the novel, in a Canadian school he would check off many of the boxes for autism or perhaps, somewhat less precisely, neurodiversity.

He needs rules and order for everything, and deviation from routine can be quite upsetting to him; Jamie likes maths because it does not need trigger warnings for content: “That might make it the most beautiful language.” He also likes poetry, but finds it frustrating “trying to figure out the feelings of the poet and if he’s the speaker and if they are the same person.”

He describes his life as the “plot of a bad book” and tells Tadgh Foley, his workshop instructor, “I am not interested in friendship of my peers, I find them boring at best and anxiety inducing.”

Both Foley and Tess Mahon, his aide, try to help Jamie understand the world as they struggle with their own grief and raw emotions. Feeney develops these characters as their emotions rub against each other.

Grief is the common denominator for these adults as well as for Jamie. While the story is set at the beginning of the school year, what readers encounter is the aftermath of other events that have affected the main characters’ lives. Often they are unable to articulate what the problem is — even to themselves.

Some may be offended by the very liberal sprinkling of copulatory language in these discussions. But Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the little donkey — the colour is needed to give readers a feeling for the country, which Feeney says is “traditionally culturally quite conservative. It’s very much a theocracy, the church and state are intertwined in all institutions.” English is spoken throughout Ireland, though some regard it as a “traitor’s tongue” — Gaelic is often the preferred language.

Feeney goes into fairly detailed discussion of building the boat — not just any boat, but a currach, peculiar to Ireland. The project takes inspiration from the Donegal currachs, custom built to a size required by the owner using reeds interlaced with laths, the whole thing covered with canvas, which is then tarred.

Jamie is distressed when he learns the currach is normally built by a meitheal, a sort of a co-op to speed along the labour-intensive project.

Feeney’s skill at interweaving characters, at once as simple and complex as the currach, make for an enjoyable read. But it requires a reader’s undivided attention and does not come to a firm resolution.

Gordon Arnold is a Winnipeg writer.