Jonathan Buckley: One Boat review - a shore thing

One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound attention to what otherwise might be inconsequential moments of connection, their soft, contemplative intimacies and banal departures.

In the wake of her father’s death, a woman returns to the small Greek town where she mourned her mother nine years earlier. The narratives of her two trips are interwoven, as the events of the second provoke reflections on the first. She encounters Petros, a poet and mechanic who believes in the consciousness of a sunflower to the warmth and light. She speaks with Niko, a diving instructor with whom she had previously fallen into a short romance, and who is now married to Arina, who runs the souvenir shop in town. And she discusses brutality in The Iliad with Xanthe, a waitress who teaches her some Greek. Buckley’s vivid dialogue captures the worlds of each of these actors, and their rich presence is set starkly against the hazily drawn outline of Teresa – Buckley’s rarely-named protagonist.

Teresa navigates a landscape in which characters stay – only briefly –  in open harbours, unable to drop anchor. As Petros expresses: “My roots are in the topsoil. A dandelion, not a tree.” Teresa is divorced from her own roots, grieving her family and her marriage; the fragile wisps of memory float loosely around the glitter of her uncertain present. Her broken recollections are told through notes in her journal, but Buckley keeps these distinctly elliptical. She writes, for instance, that “love is not an act of will”, and that Xanthe “would make a wonderful killer.” These notes strange in their serious inexactness.

Memories of her life back home, too, are chimerical: the little messages that invade her phone from her ex-husband are laid aside like dreams. All through the novel, Buckley’s language shines with recognition even in the most insignificant of encounters: 

He was holding up an arm, the forearm horizontal, at eye level. A mosquito was quivering on his skin. ‘Off you go,’ he said, then blew on it, just enough to make it fly.

We sat on the concrete platform for a minute more, before he said, as if to himself: ‘We don’t know much.’

To which I could only answer: ‘No.’

One Boat, thereby, is a novel of brief, insect intimacies. A narrative told from the tourist’s perspective might rose-tint the landscape or else verge on voyeurism, but Buckley treats this subject with light care.

Across the novel, he pays close attention to the transient relation of individuals to all settings and moments. Teresa is suspended loosely in the present, overwhelmed by its intensity and size: “All categories and names were lost in the totality of it, dissolved in the light.” Like a jellyfish hanging in the kaleidoscopic water, she allows the seconds of our short present to pass – “a momentary arrangement of energy […] almost-nothing”. Teresa spends many hours underwater, even diving to a wreck. The only souvenirs she takes are the touch of the instructor’s hand, and the weight of her own intaking breath. The past does not surface. In an interview with Lola Seaton for The New Statesman, Buckley quotes the novelist Henry Green, who described prose as a "gathering web of insinuations". In One Boat, narratorial control is loosened. The present moment appears in the novel as another gathering web, as Teresa floats on the meniscus of the past, unable to pierce its depths.

Through this disintegration of control, Buckley’s reflections on grief open doors to a complex exploration of personal boundaries and agency. Richard Robinson has described Tell, Buckley’s Goldsmith Prize-shortlisted 12th novel, as “a philosophical refusal of narrative linearity that is replete with stories”. One Boat might not be so confidently defined. The experience of mourning disintegrates any potential for repletion, for satedness, for any sense of successful communication. The editorial drive to package and define (and therefore market) stories is quietly, elegantly satirised. Mourning has shattered the language of definition. Teresa considers herself “a person-shaped receptacle full of all kinds of organisms, shoals of them, swilling around incessantly.” The web of insinuation compounds itself, and Teresa drifts.

In One Boat, Buckley resists the urge to reconstruct and excavate the remains of other people. Nothing is more vivid than the face directly beside you, looking out at the water. Teresa’s mother, for example, is described by her father as having had the mind of a “guillotine”. A mind like that is never reproduced. Following the loss of her family nucleus, her mother, her father and her husband, Teresa seeks immediacy and presence. Her estrangement is countered by the distinct company of each new acquaintance. Intimate exchanges with strangers hold no expectation for progress or movement; nothing is transactional. As Buckley’s poet notes: "the sea wants boats." The object of both the boat and the water is touch. Boats crave to be held in the lull of the still, glittering water.

Across the novel, each conversation is a convergence, a boat pressing against the outline of the sea. The most striking moments of connection are glancing and small: eye contact with a dog; hesitant conversations; the calming touch of a hand on a shoulder; or the misted edges of two forms pressing together. Buckley’s characters reach recognition in these harbours, before their eventual return to the wide and empty sea. 

• One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (£12.99, Fitzcarraldo)
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