Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor

Wednesday, Mar. 12, 2025--San Antonio

Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor is set on a small island 5 miles off the coast of Wales where fewer than 40 people live and half of the homes are abandoned due to the hard life on the island and the desire of young persons to leave for the mainland.  One young girl is a star pupil who knows not only Welsh, but also speaks and writes English.  The timing is the 1930's with rumors of war coming, but the news is always delayed by a couple of weeks or more before arriving on the island.  Two researchers from Oxford arrive on the island to study the people and their culture--their music, their stories, their life daily lives, etc.  They hire the young girl to be their assistant for interacting with the locals and for writing what is said and translating it into English for the book the researchers will publish.  The book gives a great picture of what the harsh life is like on the islands.  It also shows that the "researchers" are misinterpreting what they are seeing and hearing and will be presenting a story that is not really true to the life there but to how the researchers have romanticized it to themselves.  (Reading the book brought back memories of the criticisms that Margaret Mead and other anthropologists from that time period eventually received for their work in remote civilizations being misrepresentations.)  The researchers eventually disappoint not only the young girl but also the reader in an emotional ways.  But that was apparently a typical problem for anthropologists of that period in time.  It took a while to really get interested at the beginning of the book, but I soon found myself really enjoying the "real story" of life on the island.  I gave it 4 stars out of 5.