First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by Knopf on May 13, 2025
A great joy of reading is the opportunity to imagine ways of living that are unlike our own. The Boy from the Sea is a character-driven family drama. The family lives in Donegal during the 1980s. Males in Donegal are expected to fit into a stereotype of working-class men who are stoic and silent, who hold their thoughts and problems close, and who avoid calling attention to themselves. They obey cultural norms that, with some subtlety, govern their responses to social situations.
The men have no idea how to communicate with their wives and children and are afraid that any meaningful attempt to do so will be seen as a kind of weakness or failure. The female characters admire their men and keep a sharp eye on their children to be sure they follow the model their fathers have established. The need to "fit in" and for their children to do so is uppermost in the adult characters' minds.
Ambrose Bonnar is a fisherman, as are most of the men in Donegal. He is respected in the community because he knows his place, keeps his head down, and follows the social rules. His best friend is a fisherman named Thomas. Ambrose is married to Christine and they have a son named Declan. Christine has a sister named Phyllis; their aging and declining father is Eunan. Phyllis made a less fortunate match than Christine and comes to depend on her sister for financial assistance. That dynamic contributes to the drama.
For a time, Ambrose fishes with Thomas; they drag a net fastened to both their boats and split the catch. They make decent money by Donegal standards but times are changing. “No one yet admitted it but the North Atlantic cod fishery was collapsing and there’d soon be next to none.” They resent the ability of other Europeans to fish in their waters but resent even more the restrictions imposed by governments to curtail overfishing.
The partnership ends when Thomas buys a larger and faster boat. Ambrose would like to do the same but learns that Christine has failed to make some mortgage payments because she knows their community’s bank won’t foreclose. The bank might not foreclose but it won’t lend more money to a family with delinquent payments. Ambrose can’t compete with bigger trawlers and fears it is only a matter of time before he will need to stop fishing and join his brothers in England, where other Irish men have fled to find jobs as laborers for pay that isn’t available in Ireland. Ambrose doesn't want to become “the person you had to become to be the kind of person who goes to England,” a change in personality akin to “giving up the drink or finding God.”
The story opens with a local man’s discovery of a baby, floating into the bay in a barrel that has been cut in half and lined with tinfoil. Some Donegal residents suspect that the man actually found the baby on the beach, but his story of wading into the bay to retrieve the barrel is more colorful.
After being passed from family to family for a short time, Ambrose and Christine decide to raise the baby as their own. That decision will spark jealousy from Declan, who doesn’t want to share his father’s attention with a boy who doesn’t share the same blood. Ambrose and Christine name the boy Brendan. Brendan’s true origin becomes a source of gossipy drama near the story’s end.
The boy from the sea becomes a local legend. As he grows, he gives simple blessings to town residents, saying things like “Hopefully things will work out for you.” Not much of a blessing, perhaps, but one that is appreciated by people who value restraint, who mistrust promises and overstatements.
The story offers a few eventful moments (too few to spoil by discussing them here), but The Boy from the Sea is probably not a good choice for readers who are only interested in plot-driven fiction. The novel’s value lies in its depiction of Donegal and its residents. The story is narrated in the third person by an observer using the term “we,” but context suggests that the narrative voice is that of Donegal. It is the collective voice of lifelong inhabitants who share the same perspective on how life should be lived. The community is open to forgiveness of those who stray from its core values, but only when the time seems right. “Life was a sort of procession and we all marched in it together, you had to keep up.”
More precisely, the story seems to be narrated by the men of Donegal. “Donegal men had strikingly big key fobs, we tended to have many padlocks in our lives.” When Ambrose decides that Declan is grown and doesn’t need him anymore, the narrative chorus deems this “a grim way to think and we would’ve told him that had we been the types to meddle.” The men distinguish themselves from the “alternative lifestylers” with shaggy hair and sandals who come from Europe to enjoy the sea. To the men of Donegal, the sea is their life, something to be respected. They have little tolerance for leisure or for those who have time to enjoy their lives.
Garrett Carr paints a sharply focused picture of Donegal residents as people who know their place in the social order, who are intent on not troubling others. When Eunan had a stroke, he was aware of what was happening “but said nothing as he hadn’t wanted to make a show of himself.” If they complain at all, they turn their complaints to the weather or other topics that will not spark controversy. They know their lot in life is to bear whatever misfortune comes their way and they are proud of their ability to do so without complaint.
The women are similar but, in private, are more likely to give voice to feelings of resentment. When Phyllis and Christine watch a documentary about the likely aftermath of nuclear war, they agree that Donegal is too unimportant to be bombed. “Yes, it’ll be nuclear winter for us,” said Phyllis bitterly, “we’ll be expected to put up with it.”
In a beautiful scene, Ambrose and Christine reconnect after Ambrose is nearly lost at sea in the novel’s most harrowing moment. As they explore each other’s bodies, they remind each other about the source of their scars: fishhooks and rope burns for Ambrose, kitchen knives and rescuing Brendan from a barbed wire fence for Christine. Carr collapses lifetimes into those scars. The concept of two lovers reminding themselves of all they have done by revisiting their scars is striking.
Carr’s prose is fluid and strong; his characterizations are insightful. Declan would like to be a chef but he comes to accept that being a fisherman is his destiny. Brendan, having his roots in the sea rather than Donegal, is the character most likely to chase a dream, but it isn’t clear until the novel’s end that Brendan has one.
The ending doesn’t definitively resolve the mystery of Brendan’s origin but it offers a likely answer. It also suggests that fates to which we have reconciled ourselves might be changed if we have the courage not to be governed by expectations. These are powerful themes. As a debut novel, The Boy from the Sea establishes Carr as a writer who merits an audience.
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