“There’s a gap in the market for fishing families in Ireland,” Garrett Carr is telling me over coffee and scones in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel. Our literary canon is chock-full of farms and feuds and aggrieved eldest sons, but despite our island status, the fishing novel has somehow – forgive me – slipped through the net. Until now, that is.
Carr has just published his debut novel for adults, The Boy from the Sea. Set in his hometown of Killybegs, Co Donegal, it tells the story of Ambrose Bonnar, a fisherman, and his immediate family. When newborn baby Brendan is found on the local beach, Ambrose and his wife, Christine, adopt him into their family, but their older son Declan takes a dislike to the baby. Over a period of nearly two decades, the book follows the trials of the Bonnar family, the rivalries of Brendan and Declan and the changing fortunes of the small fishing town.
“It had always been in my mind to write about it,” says Carr. “My father was a fisherman so it seemed like something I’d be entitled to write about.”
The book wasn’t supposed to be a novel at all. In fact, it started as a very personal project for Carr. Having read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, where an elderly father writes a letter to his young son, Carr got the idea to do the same for his two sons. “This is probably all informed by the fact that my father died when I was quite young, so you lose that possibility of asking questions or just being adults together…”. But the letter quickly receded and morphed into a novel when Carr realised “there wasn’t enough drama”.
While Carr beautifully evokes the life of a fisherman in a small town, what the book really homes in on is the central issue of men who cannot communicate their feelings.
“I was interested in men,” says Carr. “The atmosphere that I grew up in was one of complete disinterest, even mistrust, of self-analysis and self-understanding. These men didn’t examine their emotional states at all. I thought that was quite an interesting thing to try to take on, and an important thing to take on because it’s a real issue.”
A stint working in the America as a young man opened his eyes to the fact that there might be alternative styles of communication. “Americans tended to be much more aware of themselves and their own story, and in extreme cases would even refer to themselves in the third person. After a while over there I did start to think maybe they’re on to something.”
In some ways I’m reacting against a sort of a literary voice that’s full of emotional awareness. I wanted it to sound like it was written by a person who’d never read a book
Carr says his wife, who is from London, taught him how to communicate. “She comments quite rightly that in the pubs in Donegal, you will have the groups of men who are sort of quieter along the bars and it seems to be the women who are keeping the whole thing ticking over, the women who are keeping people talking, and doing the emotional lifting in these conversations and keeping the whole social glue together. If it were all men, they’d probably just drift into complete silence entirely.
“She just comes from a house where they talk all the time. And one way she got me really into the importance of narrating how you feel about things is she said this is very important for our children, because in order for them to be able to do that, you have to model it for them. And so that’s obviously the most convincing argument of all.”
It’s interesting to talk about the effects of men who are not able to communicate, or perhaps not taught how to communicate, especially in an era when young men are being raised with a strong impression of the negative or “toxic” aspects of their selfhood, without being told very much about the positives. I wonder is that nurturing a sense of shame in young men.
“A lot of things that boys seem to instinctually love, we tend to be more dismissive of or even concerned about. We often seem to inhibit our boys in that way. In a way, that’s the rising action of the novel, that’s what it’s about. So much of who you are as a man or woman is set by the time you’re around 16. Those years are so key, and [Brendan and Declan] are on a bad path. These are the key moments when they’ll decide if they come out good men or bad men, happy or unhappy, or maybe even examples of toxic masculinity. That’s the drama – will they save themselves in time?”
While the book is getting at profound emotional truths, it’s all told in the wryly humorous and anonymous first-person plural point of view, almost as if the reader is hearing the novel told to them across a pub table. What made Carr choose to tell the story from such an unusual point of view, which could have been perceived as risky?
“I was trying different voices and that plural one was the one I really enjoyed writing. I took that as a sign that there was something right about it and that I should pursue it. It’s like if you’re talking on the phone to somebody and you can tell if they’re smiling. The author probably should enjoy writing, at least a bit,” he laughs. “That may be a first step towards making sure the reader enjoys it.”
Carr took a meandering path to writing, studying fine art in what was then DIT in Mountjoy Square, Dublin, and going on to work as a graphic designer in Ireland and Central America, before settling in Belfast at the age of 29.
“I think I spent a lot of time drifting,” he says. “When I came back, that’s when I really decided I was going to give art and creative life a shot in Belfast.”
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He published a trilogy of children’s books and began working in the Seamus Heaney Centre, which is part of Queen’s University, teaching creative writing. (The writer Louise Kennedy was one of his PhD students.) In 2017, he wrote his nonfiction book, The Rule Of The Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, which was an exploration of Ireland’s Border and all that it represents. Does living in a Border county have an impact on mindset, even though Killybegs would not be considered a Border town?
“I do think it came through in the culture,” he says, “and probably helps breed a certain sort of self-reliance, that survival instinct ... It must contribute to the mindset. You’re stuck between the Border and the deep blue sea.”
As in many houses of the era, there were few books in Carr’s house growing up. “We just had a really big dictionary and a really big atlas.” However, this ended up having a direct influence on how The Boy from the Sea was written, he says.
“In some ways I’m reacting against a sort of a literary voice that’s full of emotional awareness. I wanted it to sound like it was written by a person who’d never read a book. I thought that it seemed a good way to produce something original and maybe in a way to help it feel more like it’s been told verbally. I guess that is an outcome of growing up in a house without books, because without that it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me. It wouldn’t occur to me that you could still have a kind of a literary culture without books. It’s just that it’s all verbal.”
Carr is dyslexic but was undiagnosed as a child. “It was really obvious. I did the classic transposition of letters, which is a really typical symptom. And I did that as a child all the time, but people didn’t know about it. It mainly affects my spelling,” he says. “My reading is fine. But not being able to spell obviously does restrict things. I just use Microsoft Word and the Google search engine ... if you get your word close enough, then it’ll often present you with the correct word, which helps. The trick is trying not to worry about it too much and to never ever let it affect your word choice.”
As a fisherman’s son, Carr says there was never a suggestion that he might follow in his father’s footsteps and become a fisherman himself. “My parents were quite well travelled. My father worked on oil tankers before he became a fisherman so he had been around the world. He didn’t have a parochial view, he was interested in world politics. And my mother was a nurse and she had worked in Africa and a couple of other countries so they had a slightly bigger sense of the world than Christine and Ambrose.”
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He says he thinks more about his parents now than ever. “The older you get, the more you think about your parents. You just get more reflective when you’re older and think more about where you came from, probably because you’re looking at your successes and your mistakes, and you’re looking for the root of them. What’s beautiful about it is you understand them more. In some of the sections about Ambrose, I’m analysing my father. But it’s not as simple as saying Ambrose is based on my father. It’s kind of me as well.”
The Boy from the Sea is published by Picador. Garrett Carr will be appearing at the Cúirt International Festival, Galway in April cuirt.ie
