Book Review: ‘The Fisherman’s Gift,’ by Julia R. Kelly

THE FISHERMAN’S GIFT, by Julia R. Kelly

“The Fisherman’s Gift” begins with a child washed up on a Scottish beach after a storm in 1900. A fisherman, Joseph, finds the boy, and carries him through the local village, Skerry Sands, past the shop where the novel’s Greek chorus of housewives gather, to the minister, who in time entrusts the boy to the schoolteacher Dorothy. Dorothy’s own son, Moses, disappeared in a similar storm several years earlier when he was just 6 years old. In an early sign of the novel’s difficulties, this stranger child is sometimes uncannily like and at other moments obviously different from Moses.

While the boy is with Dorothy, the story of Moses’ conception, birth and disappearance returns to the center of village life and conversation. Dorothy is not a Skerry native; she moved to the fishing village to teach, and her limited social skills and professional status meant that she has remained an outsider, especially after the breakdown of her marriage to a village man, and after she raised and lost her child in the community. She has remained aloof from the village women; in turn they regard her with suspicion and resentment, particularly for her ambiguous relationship with the otherwise eligible Joseph.

The novel’s plot is simple: A stranger comes to town, and then a stranger child comes to town. It’s a good engine for unraveling the stories buried in an isolated village, and in “The Fisherman’s Gift” there are many tales lurking underneath the animating mystery. They include the daughter of a violent marriage resisting her own violent husband; several women more and less maddened by grief for sons and brothers lost at sea; mothers with too many children and some with children lost; men struggling to fulfill their required roles on land and sea.

The village of Skerry is nicely realized, and Kelly describes the sea and weather vividly. The story is well paced and the dialogue strong, always a challenge with dialect speech from long ago.

But there are flaws in craft and focus. The omniscient narrator treads heavily, often in prominent sentence fragments pointing out the obvious. A chapter begins, “And there are other things she must face in this moment of truth in her life.” A paragraph between two reflections is, “How much has happened since.” These things shouldn’t, and in fact don’t, need flagging. And there are repetitions of images and phrases, to which we are all prone but they shouldn’t make it to publication. Three times someone’s instinct for mishap is compared to “the way you know when you knock at a door that no one’s home.” Small matters, maybe, but the cumulative effect is a distracting clumsiness.

Furthermore, there is fundamental indecision about what kind of book this is. The novel gestures toward fable and fantasy, first hinted at with an epigraph from Yeats’s “The Stolen Child.” Fine; there are some excellent recent novels that play with North Atlantic folklore to explore community, individualism and the powers of the natural world.

But “The Fisherman’s Gift” invokes the supernatural and then strives to provide realist explanations at every turn. The story depends heavily on coincidences, including a minor character apparently brought in solely to fall off a bicycle with an important telegram as Dorothy happens to be passing. A full investment in folklore would obviate the need for such far-fetched events. And still there are clunky omens (lucky wedding salt spilled as Dorothy’s ill-fated husband carries her over the threshold on her wedding day, dreams and sleepwalking that foreshadow disaster) and a central resolution in supernatural terms.

This feels, in the end, like a promising novel that needed more conviction. It is not without strengths — the characters and setting are memorable — but the magic and rationalism undermine each other, leaving the reader frustrated by both.

THE FISHERMAN’S GIFT | By Julia R. Kelly | Simon & Schuster | 355 pp. | $28.99