The Little Interview with Elizabeth O'Connor - Whale Fall

The Little Bookshop
7 days ago
11 min read

ABOUT THIS INTERVIEW

This interview is different than our other "The Little Interviews". Because this time our readers could ask any question they had to Elizabeth. How was this possible you might wonder? Well, this book was chosen as our Book Pick for May and I asked Elizabeth if she'd like to participate in this type of interview. Everyone had such a great time coming up with questions and Elizabeth answered ALL of them (no spoilers). We really appreciate this, so thank you so much for this!

OUR INTERVIEW

About the writing/book

Your short stories have appeared in some literary journals and we were wondering while reading your debut novel : were you influenced by the technique of short stories to create a different rhythm to the story (short chapters, not mentioning all details from the beginning)?

Not consciously, no, although I think starting out in short stories has shaped the way I write. I also read a lot of stories, and enjoy their ambiguity and brevity – I like reading endings and narratives that are a little open and unresolved (though not unsatisfyingly so). Short stories are good at this, and I think I try and take that into my novels.

In the notes, you already gave a bit of an explanation about the influences/research about the island. But we’re wondering more in depth about how you did this research exactly? And also if you perhaps have someone in your family who lived on an island - so you could draw inspiration from them? Or perhaps you know some people living on islands who gave you more insights?

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.

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, mythologising of the mainland and larger cities, ambition, living alongside nature, and a sense of a way of life disappearing over time. 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.

I also had a family connection to people who live with the sea and shore: my grandfather was from the coast of West Ireland, 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.

Do you think the story of Manod could have been written in any other setting (rather than her island)?

This is such a pertinent question. I have recently done some workshops around place- and landscape-writing. It made me realise that in the best place-driven novels, the landscape is necessary; the characters and plot would not be the same if they were transported somewhere else.

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’. In that sense, no, I don’t think it could be anywhere else.

Why did you choose this period of time?

There are a few U.K. islands that were either formally evacuated or became uninhabited in the first half of the twentieth century: particularly Bardsey Island (Wales, not evacuated but mostly uninhabited by around 1960), St. Kilda (Scotland, evacuated 1930), and the Blasket Islands (Ireland, evacuated 1953). I wondered what these communities could tell us about living at a time of similar anxiety, about how our culture and ways of living might be influenced by the landscapes we live alongside, especially when those landscapes symbolise a kind of alienation and loss.

When I was editing the novel at the start of last year, it was also the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a deep-rooted anxiety about war in Europe feeling familiar once again. Now the paperback is published with the context of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and there is again a feeling of war closing in, of having to make a choice to look towards or away from horror. To consider the possibility of war in your lifetime. How do you continue with ordinary life in the face of it? What choices are we consciously and unconsciously making, and what is out of our control?

About the island

This story with its characters and island feels so real. Why the decision to write about an island that doesn’t exist instead of a real island?

In one sense, I felt it would be restrictive to write about a specific island. I would have questions like – but researchers didn’t visit that island in 1938? There wasn’t a church on that island? There wasn’t a whale beaching there? So it was a practical choice to have an imaginative island, one that I could explore on my own terms.

I was also inspired by the different histories of the islands I had researched, and wanted to think in depth about what connected and united them. To link to bigger themes like climate change, culture, disappearing communities, it felt right to create a fictional island that could consider these things more widely.

About the characters

We loved to get to know Manod and this slice of island life. It’s intriguing, fascinating, and authentic. We had quite some discussions about the characters, character traits, and background information. We have plenty of ideas/theories but the only person who really knows everything is you… So we decided to ask you everything:

Does Manod know what really happened to her mother?

I think she knows what she can – she knows that she drowned, that she committed suicide, but possibly not the complexities of why.

Did Manod’s mom have postpartum depression and is Llinos on the spectrum?

I think so, yes, although it is of course up to interpretation 😉

Joan and Edward are asking Manod all sorts of questions about life on the island. In comparison we don’t see Manod asking them many questions - why not?

I think Manod is so keen to not appear like an ‘islander’, i.e. not provincial, not sheltered, unaware of mainland life, naive. She wants them to see her as someone deserving of the ‘mainland lifestyle’, which she understands to mean being intelligent, sophisticated,and knowing. Asking too many questions would betray her as someone unfamiliar with their world.

Manod is helping her sister while she’s on her period and we were wondering: when Manod was on her very first period, was her mom there for her so she knows how to help her sister? Or she had to figure it out by herself and doesn’t want this for her sister?

I had never thought about this! I think a bit of both - women on the island are generally practical so I can imagine her mother helping her in practical and distantly loving way. It may not have been as tender as with Llinos, which speaks to their close relationship and the way Manod wants to protect her from the cruelties of the world. Perhaps also that Llinos is disabled, and Manod feels compelled to give her that extra security and time for understanding.

How was the life of Manod’s parents together? I imagine fairly loving – the girls seem to have had models for kindness and care for one another. Even though he is practical and stoic, Tad is ultimately a caring father, which we see at the end when he comforts her about Edward and doesn’t judge her. I imagine that he didn’t know how to support his wife when she struggled, but that they did love each other.

Why did her mother choose the island life? I think she grew up in a similar setting if not an island – probably a very closed, isolated rural community on the mainland of Wales with little opportunities for young women. She saw a man who was capable, earned a living, lived among a community, and it seemed a good match and marriage. I imagine that she didn’t think too closely about what it would really mean to join this island community, and that it might contribute to her mental health crisis.

We were not expecting that Edward was saying Joan is a Fascist, why did you decide to put this in the story?

I’m often quite unsettled by the political landscape of the U.K., which feels increasingly nationalistic and fascistic. In writing about an island, I was thinking a lot about the language far-right politicians were using around Brexit and immigration, this sense of our shores being ‘under threat’ or ‘invaded’, threats to ‘British identity’ and ‘British culture’, whatever that means, and how that leads to quite sinister ideas. Eco-fascism was also something I was interested in exploring, especially in the 1930s where rural labourers and ‘the blood of the land’ were so idealised in fascist narratives, and I wanted to think about how landscape and power might inter-relate.

Why is Joan angry at Manod about Edward? Did they have a previous relationship or is Joan tired of Edward and younger girls?

Readers always have different interpretations of this, which I love ! For me, it’s because she feels Manod didn’t ’know her place’ as someone working for them, a bit like a maid in a grand country house sleeping with its patriarch. I think there is also a sense of betrayal – Joan feels she has done Manod a great kindness and given her opportunities that Manod has thrown back in her face.

I wonder also if Joan has an anger at her lack of control in the situation. She is someone who has worked very hard, is very intelligent, and takes her work seriously. She has probably been dismissed as a female researcher for most of her career. She has high expectations of others and likes to be ‘in charge’ of her research projects, and Manod’s actions have shown her that she is not.

Why do we have more information about Joan’s family than Edward’s? I imagine Joan is simply more open about her family – Edward holds things back, especially with Manod who he tries to keep distant emotionally.

About the whale

We have several theories about the title:

- like the Natural History Museum says: when a whale dies it will begin to sink, falling kilometre after kilometre, until finally coming to rest on the seabed. This is when the carcass becomes known as a whale fall.

- because of the season and it’s happening in the fall season- because this is island life: something washes up ashore. The islanders are fascinated by this and then the curiosity slowly diminishes. It’s all part of life and the process of the whale dying/falling is a process that happens in life

- because the people from mainland take things from the islanders

- they don’t say how important the oil can be, they want it all for themselves What does the title mean to you?

I agree with all of the above – I liked that it set up a cycle of one thing ending and one thing beginning, which felt apt for the island for Manod’s life. Similarly the whale is a water-dwelling creature stuck on land, and in a similar way Manod is ‘stuck’ in a place she doesn’t belong. I also liked the way it mirrored the ‘scavenging’ of the researchers.

As for the whale, I really wanted the whale to have quite a prismatic symbolism, morphing between different meanings and symbolisms depending on the perspective; so the islanders’ responses would be different collectively to them as individuals, and different again to the visitors, to the reader and to different points of the narrative. I wanted to explore the meanings we take from and project onto nature, and how those can be quite slippery.

For the islanders as a whole, for instance, the whale might be a bad omen, for war on the horizon or the changing weather conditions, or even quite an ordinary thing for a group of people who live so much with the unpredictability of their landscape. To Manod, there are further layers, connections to her mother, to her own passage between land and sea. And to a reader thinking about the islanders, they might take it as a symbol of their slowly disappearing way of life.

About publishing

We all loved your story and think it’s wonderfully written. Yet there are so many more layers we don’t see on the cover text. We were wondering how you pitched your story to your publisher? Could you please tell us a bit about how this process of publishing went for you?

Thank you so much ! I can tell from your questions that you read it so thoughtfully, and I really appreciate that.

I was approached by agents after publishing some short stories, who asked if I was working on anything longer. It took me two years after that to finish Whale Fall, but I then sent it out to them to see if they were still interested. Luckily for me, they were ! I signed with one agent and then we sent it out to some publishers.

I have really enjoyed the publishing process – it has been so interesting to see everything that happens as a lifelong reader. It can be competitive and that side of it is hard – you never feel that you are good enough. I have to remind myself that I’m only starting out, and only have to write things that I’m proud of myself. Then I can enjoy the rollercoaster 😉

BONUS QUESTIONS ABOUT WHALE FALL

What are you reading at the moment ?

I am currently reading Isabella Hammad’s ’Enter Ghost’, which is fantastic. I am also reading a collection of essays by the silent film star Louise Brooks, who wrote about her life in Hollywood in the 1920s. That is for research for Book number 2 ! 😉

Can you give us a hint about your next book ?

I am definitely feeling the ‘difficult second album’ cliché at the moment, but I’ll say it’s set in the bizarro world of dog shows, and looks at what it means to dedicate your life to an animal.

Thank you so much Elizabeth for answering ALL our questions! We loved your book and hope to read your second one soon!

Interested by this fascinating book? You can of course find it at the shop or order it via our click and collect form!