The Fisherman's Gift

“Kelly’s skillfully delineated characters and expertly woven plot provide an engrossing story that lifts the spirits.”

Julia Kelly’s debut novel features a propulsive plot and endearing characters. From the opening scene of a storm at sea which not only sends “shirts and sheets flying like winged banshees over rooftops” but washes a child up on the shore, the book progresses quickly and seamlessly. Suspense is sustained to the last sentence of the story.

The plot is reminiscent of Niall Williams’ recent novel, The Time of the Child, though without the religious overtones of Williams’ book, in which the discovery of a child at Christmastime evokes a nativity scene. In Kelly’s work, the saving of a half-drowned older child during a storm by a recluse living by the ocean awakens long-repressed memories in the recluse and a woman who lost a child the same age to drowning years earlier.

Kelly’s portrait of the bond between mother and child, especially in the first hours of a child’s life, is tender and convincing, as when a nursing mother “has the strange feeling that the birth didn’t separate them at all.” The central character, Dorothy, who never recovered from the loss of her child, is given a second chance.

Kelly’s style is spare, though some of her descriptions of setting use powerful imagery. After the storm, she describes “the strange way the storm ripped the sand from the beach, exposing the ancient landscape beneath . . . .” The lack of much figurative language means that the book does not explore as fully as it might questions about the purpose of human life the death of a child and the proximity of a community to the pitiless ocean might provoke.

Kelly’s work, like Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child—also about a lost child—sometimes incorporates the surreal. When a storyteller relates a fairy tale at a community dance, Kelly uses repetition and alliteration to evoke a mysterious world below the surface of the sea. Dorothy “listens for the voices of the sea, and in amongst the hush and suck of the water, breathing in, breathing out, she thinks she hears them, the children from the Otherworld, before she falls back into a deep and dreamless sleep.”

The book involves the reader deeply in the fates of the characters, especially Dorothy and Joseph, the man who rescues the child, who has known Dorothy a long time but has barely spoken to her for years. Their small community has many pitiless members—reminiscent of those in Claire Keegan’s story of a child in peril in Ireland, Small Things Like These—as well as compassionate people like its minister, Joseph, and a brother-sister pair, William and Jane. Dorothy’s educated background in Edinburgh brought her to the small Scottish fishing village that is the book’s only setting as schoolmistress, a role that alternately sustains and constrains her. 

Kelly’s use of “Then” and “Now” rather than specific years as time markers lend the story a universal quality. The plot slips effortlessly back and forth between past and present, as if to illustrate Faulkner’s contention that “the past is never dead.” Dorothy often wonders if her past is being re-enacted, as Kelly viscerally demonstrates how memory and desire can seem to evoke lost loved ones. By withholding narration of the central traumatic event, the loss of Dorothy’s child, until nearly the end of the book, the author masterfully maintains suspense.

The tentative movement toward renewed hope and love by people who have lived long and suffered losses is one that the author, an older debut novelist, clearly understands well. She depicts the nature of grief astutely, noting how Dorothy’s “fear of forgetting . . . slowly became a fear of remembering.” Kelly’s skillfully delineated characters and expertly woven plot provide an engrossing story that lifts the spirits.