What, was the cover designer on holiday this week? I could have done that.
One Boat, by Jonathan Buckley, was on the longlist for the Booker this year. It didn’t make the shortlist, which I think is the right decision. Nice book, but not a winner. The Greek Island setting is lovely, reminiscent of holidays past, the writing evocative and I almost really enjoyed it but there was something a bit too clever about the way we jumped around in different time periods. It felt like an editor had switched some chapters around to make the book more exciting. It didn’t work. The book is still slow and introspective. And also jumpy.
Teresa comes twice to the coastal village and both times she is mourning, the first time for her mother and then, nine years later, for her father. She does a lot of philosophical thinking. Probably the only thing more boring than navel gazing is thinking about navel gazing. “…set on this very spot, but this was also the first time that this had happened, as every occasion had been a first time. In each, the preceding occasions were also present, and only in this one, now, were all of them present. This has not happened before and it will not happen again, I told myself. And: It is becoming part of who I am, who I will be, even if much of it – all of it – is forgotten. This hour is my good fortune – mine, whoever I may be. Yet…” There’s a lot of this sort of thing to skim over. There are also dreams. God save us from authors who write characters’ dreams for readers to analyse.
Something about Teresa I find disquieting. She describes herself: “Handsome rather than beautiful. Insufficiently feminine, some men – and women – have thought. I was known to my first colleagues – some of them –as Brünnhilde. This was overheard in the toilets. I have been thought ‘blunt’ or ‘uncompromising’ or ‘rude’, according to taste. A perfectionist. A straight arrow. A strong oar. The combination of temperament and build has been professionally advantageous. ‘Arouse and Intimidate’ might have been my personal motto, Tom said. On our very first date he told me I could be a Swedish or a Dutch woman who had switched to the law after injury had curtailed the tennis career.”
Funny, but in reality these are all nasty put-downs and I don’t imagine Teresa defining herself by them as she seems to think herself quite fanciable. The suggested ambivalent femininity doesn’t surface in the story, everyone seems to find her attractive in an approachable way. Am I sensing the male author behind this description? Her casual sex with the handsome young diving instructor also hits a clanging note. It’s is not impossible, but tricky for a male author to imagine a woman’s sexuality well, and I don’t think Buckley gets it here. Perhaps he is aiming for a ‘Shirley Valentine’, but if so, he misses the sweetness of Shirley. “There were four nights more, each one spent with Niko. Or rather, some hours of each one spent with Niko. Each slept alone. It was a succession of one-night stands .… Between bouts, some intense eye-to-eye gazing was done. Questions were silently asked: What is this? What are we doing? What we were doing was extremely simple, for me. That was the value of it.”
“Between bouts?” Probably between bouts young Niko was finding a woman his own age to play with.
The other odd thing, and I will get onto the positives soon! was the presumption that all the villagers would remember this tourist, who visited for a week or so nine years before. The woman who runs the cafe, Niko the seductive dive instructor, an older bloke called Petros all remember her by name. How many thousands of tourists come through these tourist towns, all looking and acting the same, sitting at a cafe writing in a notebook, looking wistfully out at the sea?
There is a mystery about a man who hit another man on the head as a minor plot line so you can kind of add ‘mystery’ to the blurb.
The most appealing character is a dog, owned by an old poet philosopher, Petros. Teresa has lots of conversations, pretty one sided, with him (Petros, not the dog), sitting on the wall looking out over the sea. Some interesting, some not so much. Again, these feel like the author’s preoccupations rather than the characters. “We don’t have a separate mini-self who has the job of conducting the examination and reporting back – to the occupant of the vault, presumably, because that’s the true self, after all. In which case, the scrutinizer has to be scrutinized too, if we’re doing a comprehensive self-inspection. Which begs the question: who’s scrutinizing the scrutinizer? And where do we find the scrutinizer of the scrutinizer of the scrutinizer?”
“‘When we think about it, we don’t exist,'” she says, which is pretty meta for a character.
Still haven’t got onto the good bits. That’s the thing about writing reviews. Sometimes you get to the end and realise you didn’t really like the book at all.
Cristina Sanders' blog 