FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION, by Eoghan Walls
Ever since Robinson Crusoe washed up on his South Pacific atoll, islands have provided an appealing setting for writers of fiction. Isolated from societal and civilizational norms, the island allows the novelist to observe their characters’ descent into madness, lawlessness or depravity. The island is a petri dish for human nature.
Eoghan Walls’s new novel, “Field Notes From an Extinction,” finds us on Tor Mor, an uninhabited outcrop off the island of Inishtrahull, itself off the northernmost coast of Ireland: an island off an island off an island. The year is 1847, the height of the Great Irish Famine, which claimed a million lives and drove a similar number into exile. Our protagonist is an Englishman, Ignatius Green, a widowed naturalist and “redeemed öologist” residing on Tor Mor at the behest of his patron to document the behavior of a small colony of great auks, whom he has given Shakespearean nicknames.
The story is told through Green’s notebooks, ostensibly the field notes of the title, but increasingly a record of his struggle for survival. His ornithological research is disrupted when he discovers a seemingly feral child in a basket among his monthly delivery of provisions. Green is so unworldly that he is initially unable to age the child more accurately than “Eight? Five? Twelve?” (We later find out she is 10.) Pinned to the girl’s chest is a note asking Green to look after her, intriguingly signed “The Canniball, Aisling O’Leary.” Meanwhile, we learn through newspaper reports, interspersed among the notebook entries, of a series of mysterious deaths across Ireland, possibly perpetrated by a vengeful and preternaturally powerful woman.
It’s an intriguing and singular setup. Green is not pleased to be lumbered with an un-house-trained urchin, but a relationship of sorts develops and he does his best to continue his daily observation of the auks. He is occasionally interrupted by the shifty Liam McGonigle, a native of Inishtrahull, whom Green suspects of pilfering his provisions and having designs on his beloved (and valuable) birds.
The storytelling, it must be said, at times strains credibility. Within a day, the child goes from being limp and helpless to attacking Green with his own knife, switching “knife hands like a barroom Spaniard.” Later, in a confrontation with a group of ransacking brigands, she is a transformed into a veritable Lara Croft.
But this is a novel concerned more with the atmosphere of its setting than with narrative verisimilitude — it owes more to Jonathan Swift than to Émile Zola — and in this Walls succeeds admirably, describing a vividly realized world, impeccably rendered in the vocabulary of the day. It is a world of ambergris, gruel, gizzards, guano and grog, and Walls pulls off the not-inconsiderable feat of engaging the reader with the minutiae of taxidermy and the fate of a posse of flightless alcids.
Toward the end of the novel, our mismatched duo find themselves on a sort of odyssey across a mainland Ireland ravaged by famine. It is here, rather than on the isolated outpost of Tor Mor, that societal norms have broken down, and Walls masterfully portrays a hellscape of emaciated horses and vagabonds. Children boil up jackdaws for sustenance and apparent corpses jerk, screaming, back to life.
The scene bears comparison with the apocalyptic dystopia of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” This is, by a distance, the most powerful part of the book and one may wish for a greater part of the narrative to have unfolded in this setting. That, however, might have detracted from the more whimsical and idiosyncratic aspects of what is a unique and richly imagined novel.
FIELD NOTES FROM AN EXTINCTION | By Eoghan Walls | Seven Stories Press | 278 pp. | Paperback, $19.95
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