FICTION: Shooting the Moon,By Robert Fannin, Hachette Books Ireland, 309pp. €11.99
WRITING ABOUT the sea hasn’t become any easier since Herman Melville wrote ‘Moby-Dick’ in 1851. The sea, with its own lexicon, is a demanding subject, or setting. In recent literature, Theo Dorgan’s ‘Sailing for Home’ sets the bar high for those who write of oceans: the pace of Dorgan’s seductive prose matches that of his vessel, and the technicalities of sailing merge seamlessly with the story of the voyage.
First-time author Robert Fannin understands the sea, and particularly trawlers and fishing. Life aboard small trawlers is a rough, man’s business, often carried out with violent intensity. After days at sea, life on land for the crew is no less ugly or brutal, or so it seems. Seán Farrell, a middle-aged marriage counsellor, lives in modern day Bristol. Farrell’s own marriage has run out of excitement and he is unable to apply the advice he counsels to others to his domestic situation. Kate and Peter, new clients, are a glamorous pair in their mid-30s. Farrell is instantly attracted to Kate. He brings his problems to Phillip, his own counsellor, who asks Farrell to go back into his adolescence to see if this can reveal the source of his unhappiness. Thus begins a series of flashbacks, mainly to the fishing community of Howth in 1976, in which Farrell’s story is told.
At 17, Farrell rebels against everything and goes fishing “to embarrass my father”, a member of the Howth Yacht Club, which to many may be motive enough. In Ireland in 1976 the Provos are going full throttle, although the Special Branch know pretty much what’s going on, particularly when a dangerous IRA protagonist turns up on a trawler in Howth. Farrell is thrown into the midst of this turmoil where hard men take no prisoners. He also falls in love with a lovely English schoolgirl who is mitching from her convent in Wexford. She ends up on his boat. Farrell is not to know her real identity, which will bring the force of the law, and the Provos, down on their young heads.
Coincidence is tricky in fiction, as everyone knows. It’s hard to get away with. One way to try is to involve the coincident-ees, if you will, in riveting action. Robert Fannin rolls out a high-speed chase through mountainous seas, sucking the reader into every sickening pitch of an almost-doomed trawler. The author’s deft hands on the helm spin the reader at the very last moment to take the next disaster head on. I hung on for dear life, not daring even to reach for the Stugeron.
I wondered as I read this genuinely felt and at times passionately realised first novel what the result might have been had the author set even more of his story at sea. Such a choice might have made it unnecessary for the protagonist to be a marriage counsellor and thus rescue the book’s weaker moments. It is unlikely for Phillip, Farrell’s counsellor of some long standing, to know so little about his client’s adolescent background. The coincidence that emerges from Farrell’s counselling job is one coincidence too far. Farrell’s drinking sprees around Howth in the company of his friends tend to be over described, whilst the details of the rebellious youngster’s internal monologues are sometimes tedious. This may, of course, be the intention, but it left this reader yearning to be back at sea, shooting nets, plotting a course through the treacherous sandbanks off Ireland’s east coast, and smelling the heaving life of the catch as it was winched from the depths.
Robert Fannin is an interesting new name in Irish writing and ‘Shooting the Moon’ is a commendable debut.
Peter Cunningham’s novel,
The Sea and the Silence
, has just been published by New Island Books