One Boat (2025)
Why this one?
More Booker longlist reading. I needed something that felt like it was going to be more nourishing and substantial after Universality and this sounded like it was going to fit the bill.
Jonathan Buckley (1956- ; active ) was born in the Birmingham, England and now lives in Brighton. He studied English Literature at Sussex University, where he also earned an MA on the subject of modernism. He had a variety of jobs in his early career, but eventually became an editorial director at Rough Guides, writing guidebooks with a focus on Italy and also working on guides to classical music and opera.
His debut novel The Biography of Thomas Lang was published in 1997 by 4th Estate. He won the BBC National Short Story award in 2015 for “Briar Road”, and his most recent novel Tell (2022) was a joint winner of the Novel Prize (an award set up by independent publishers to reward innovative and experimental fiction) and was shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. The flurry of recognition for this book seems to have marked a turning point in Buckley’s career, as a writer who was previously often described as ‘overlooked’. One Boat, published earlier this year, is his thirteenth novel and second published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Thoughts, etc.
One Boat is told from the perspective of Teresa, a contract lawyer and aspiring author from the UK. She has recently lost her father and is making a return visit to the same Greek coastal town she visited after the death of her mother nine years before. The novel jumps back and forth between Teresa’s encounters with the same characters nine years apart: notably Xanthe, the owner of a cafe she frequents; Niko, a younger diving instructor with whom she had an affair on her first visit but is now married with a daughter; and Petros, a long-time resident also originally from the UK with whom she has lengthy philosophical conversations. There’s also a focus on another Englishman, John, who she met on her first visit and who told her of his anger and desire for revenge for the violent death of his nephew.
It’s largely a meditative, philosophical sort of book: while there are interesting vignettes of plot, there’s not a clear through-line or much in the way of resolution to any of its threads. Instead it takes us on a journey with Teresa as she explores both reading and writing, and human connection and conversation, as mechanisms to process (or perhaps distract from) her grief and search for new perspectives and meaning in her life. At least in the second visit, she is exploring writing a form of fiction (or autofiction) seemingly both as a kind of self-reflective endeavour and as a new career path - while successful in her role as a lawyer, she seems somewhat dissatisfied and in search of something more ‘meaningful’. The book is cleverly written in the way it intersperses her authentic voice with italicised sections of description from her notebook - the latter clearly more florid and ‘try hard’ in their style. Alongside this are lengthy descriptions of her dreams, which further emphasize her (eventually quite frantic) search for meaning wherever she considers it might reside. In the book’s abrupt metafictional conclusion, some of Teresa’s tendencies are deconstructed via criticism from her new partner Patrick (himself a published author of a ‘longlisted’ book about cycling).
I enjoyed the writing in general. It’s languid, sometimes impressionistic but very evocative of the haze of life by the sea in the summer. It leaps around a little narratively, sometimes requiring the reader to take a minute to reorient themselves but never needlessly confusing. And it plays cleverly with the layers it contains, both temporal and structural (in the differences in style between Teresa’s seemingly authentic inner monologue, the writing from her notebooks, the dream description and then ultimately the zoomed out ending in which we are cut free from Teresa’s voices and invited to critique them). Next to all this we also have the scant descriptions in Teresa’s second visit of the poetry Petros has started to write. Mocked by the other locals, and not necessarily award-winning on the limited evidence we have, it nonetheless intrigues Teresa in its simplicity, likely as a counterpoint to her own overwrought style. Overall it was a pleasant reading experience, lush and thought-provoking, and with exactly the kind of subtlety and nuance that I required after being bludgeoned over the head with the last book I read (pun intended).
I also found it to be generally good in terms of characters. I bought into Teresa’s journey and particularly enjoyed the conversations with Petros, which were both enjoyably written and increasingly interesting in the way Petros becomes a kind of antithesis of Teresa’s own overthinking style, to the point where he eventually leads her to directly state her desire to ‘stop thinking’. While his own minimalist approach to life (reflected in his philosophical style) may lead him to a kind of semi-isolation and maybe manifest to some as a lack of ambition, he nonetheless seems to live a relatively content life, getting much of what he needs from his job, his dogs and his somewhat eccentric but charming musings on nature. All of which is a pleasing contrast to Teresa’s own tendency towards existential contemplation and deep self analysis, leading her down an apparently self-destructive ‘hall of mirrors’ and into musings that verge on rationalising self-eradication.
I didn’t love everything about it. While I can see their purpose in highlighting Teresa’s nature, the dream sections were too long for such a short book and I mentally switched off while reading them (we all know that other people’s dreams are tedious as hell and I did almost cheer when Patrick effectively said the same thing in the book’s coda!) While its prime movers were interesting, other characters felt more superfluous - Niko was little more than a body (maybe the point) and I didn’t quite get to grips with Xanthe’s purpose either. There’s also a ‘mystery’ posed in the blurb (which I only read afterwards) about Petros perhaps being a part of John’s life story - a mystery that either has a very simple (and thus underwhelming) answer, or one which completely went over my head. Either way, it didn’t feel like it added much. These, for me, were relatively minor issues though in a book that I overall found to be both enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Score
8
A quiet, contemplative sort of book that reminds me a little of a bygone style of Booker winner (others have mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald, which is obviously a strong compliment!) While not revolutionary, it delivered reading pleasure and the right amount of substance and depth for my tastes. I’d certainly like to read more of Buckley’s work.
Next up
Maybe the Andrew Miller?
