Immersion in this book is swift and bewitching as we find ourselves on a strange island where an outcast boy befriends a stranded whale. The “beast-boy” lives in the Wastelands, beyond the pale of Grathico, a village which from a distance appears idyllic but really festers with fear. The boy is governed by his needs, living alongside the beasts and the birds, and is feral and free; Grathico is ruled over by the Prelate, a chilling religious zealot who wears a disturbing beaked mask. The village has absurd rituals and terrifying punishments while the boy takes seditious delight in defying them.
We are adrift in the boy’s heartbreaking sense of abandonment and motherless-ness; he is lost, exiled from the Grathicans who have control as their bible, greed and power as their engine, while he rests in the arms of the natural world that they attempt to subjugate and malign.
Like the title, the book is written in a poetic, odd dialect that at times reads like the tongue of a far-flung northern island, and at others inhabits its own orb – “orb” being the word for eye, just like “skull” is the word for head, and “lug” is for ear. The body has venal nouns, with holes, gizzards and gobs, and yet there is often a sharp slap of beauty in a phrase like “smottled with butterflies”. The brilliance of this is that it’s not only the island, the cultish village of Grathico, or Melas, the wine-dark sea which give the book its atmosphere of myth, but the language itself, the narrator’s captivating mother-tongue with its jags and rhythms.
This folkloric tale of a boy and a whale combined with such stylistic bravura is storytelling at its most primal and at its most ambitious.
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The whale is the site of the most unspeakable cruelty. Yet it isn’t unspoken but outlined in graphic detail, to the point of a gasp-out-loud moment of revelation. Just as you reach the limits of how much barbarism can be stomached, there are wonderful episodes of otherworldly communion between the boy and the creature, savage soul to savage soul, something fierce and holy. Horrifying, shocking, moving, all these words are in the novel’s water; it’s brutal, tender and wildly imaginative.
