FICTION: The BreakersBy Claudie Gallay, translated by Alison Anderson MacLehose Press, 408pp. £ 14.99

A BLEAK STRETCH of Normandy’s Cotentin coast provides an ideal setting for Claudie Gallay’s oblique mood piece. The narrator, a former biology teacher, has settled in a village there to count seabirds for a survey. Although she has a specialist, scientific interest in them, the birds are merely a diversion: she is depressed and emotionally pulverised. Her state of mind is brilliantly rendered by Alison Anderson’s perceptive translation. The narrator is self-absorbed, yet she is also a witness and watches everything. It is her way of surviving.

While maintaining her distance from life she also establishes careful friendships. At times she refers directly to the lover she has lost. “After you, I applied for two years’ sabbatical. I thought I would die. I came here.” Her misery is palpable; it is possible to feel the effort that the business of getting through the day has become for her. Within sentences the relentless, calmly persuasive narrative voice is established. The reader simply wants to discover what is happening and, more importantly, exactly what happened.

The village emerges as both refuge and prison. The small group of characters is vividly drawn; a brother and sister conduct themselves as lovers while, all around them, other characters are connected by tragedy and suspicion. Above all there is the weather: vicious storms that hurt the skin. The narrator, who lives in her thoughts and memories, is acutely aware of the sounds of the gales and the sea itself: “They say here that sometimes the wind is so strong it tears the wings from the butterflies.”

It is a demanding place for any stranger because the natives are linked by shared history. It is a most unusual French novel, in that it does not seem particularly French. Gallay has evoked a remote, beaten landscape that could be anywhere; it could be Newfoundland, or Cumbria or Connemara – an Irishwoman has settled there.

A middle-aged man arrives and excites interest. It transpires that he once lived there. When he was 15 he refused to join his parents and younger brother on an outing in a sailing boat. The three drowned; the little boy’s body was never found. The man, Lambert, is now older than his father was when he drowned. At first it seems that he wants to sell the long-deserted family holiday home, but he actually wants to investigate the accident.

His arrival gives the narrator an interest, but Gallay is too intelligent to do anything obvious. This is such a good story; it is also original in its telling. The characters interact well as people who are barely acquainted and yet know each other all too well. There are secrets but no privacy. “Questions, answers, a complicated knit of lies and truths. Things said out of synch, things said only in part, things that would never be said. All the shades of something you could only see staring into the sun.”

There is an interestingly cerebral quality to this novel, and Gallay uses it to great effect when exploring the more instinctive reactions and responses. Everything is carefully described, yet the writing is never laboured. The dialogue supports conversations that often develop into major set pieces. Early in the narrative the narrator visits Théo, a former lighthouse keeper who has lived with the blame for the sailing accident. Now elderly, he lives in a house filled with cats. He may or may not have, once upon a time, betrayed his long-estranged wife with Nan, a madwoman who patrols the beach. Having directed the narrator to a place where plovers may be observed, he tells her: “The plover is a very intelligent bird . . . When you threaten its nest, it flies away as if it were injured, and lets itself fall on to the beach . . . It does that to become the target . . . It’s all an act . . . It’s rare and admirable behaviour for a bird.”

Théo, at the mercy of his many doubts, then makes a comment that resounds through this novel of diversions and distractions: “Counting birds in this wind, that can’t be your whole life.”

By drawing on the everyday, the small rituals, the uneasy exchanges, Gallay has written a slow-moving, calm, complicated and compelling novel that balances stagnation and panic, acceptance and denial, all juxtaposed with the way the past insists on shaping the present.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times