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Readers’ Night at Central Library with Tiffany Murray, Mark Mills and Patrick Gale, 21 April 2005
A number of us read The Whaleboat House by Mark Mills and we thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a crime novel, but there’s a lot more to it than just solving a murder. It explores the relationship between the old and the new, the idle rich and the hardworking fishermen, and motivations in love and war. It is set on Long Island in a community where many of the fishing families can trace their lineage back to the first settlers. It was the Forties, just post-war, and wealthy families were just beginning to move in and buy up the land and the fishing rights. The ensuing conflicts are bubbling beneath the surface of the book, and the murder of a wealthy socialite forces issues out into the open. The Wallace family remind us of the wealthy Los Angeles families in Chandler’s writing, secret-ridden with enough money to cover everything up, a violent death threatening to topple it all. But this is a much saltier book than Chandler’s novels. There is sand between the toes, and also fishscales, rope, spears, eyes and blood. When Conrad and Lillian meet he pulls a fish hook out of her bare foot, and the erotic charge this brings is typical of the whole relationship.
Fish and blood and war. Death is an underlying theme to the book. Death, and reasons for dying. Fish die to become food and livelihood for the fishermen, but when the Wallace’s take a boat out the fish die for sport. Lillian has to die so as not to disrupt somebody else’s life. Thousands of men die in warfare, as shown in Conrad’s flashbacks to the Second World War. These juxtapositions nudge the reader into making value judgements, for example, Conrad’s fishing is seen as more noble than the Wallace family’s; and the deaths caused by Conrad on the battlefield as less contemptible than the murder of Lillian.
But the title of the novel is The Whaleboat House, reminding us of the whaling that had upheld the community and is no more, due to the depletion of the whale population. The extensive fishing which they refer to, we know with hindsight, is creating a problem in marine ecology. And Conrad’s heroic conduct on the battlefield brought him a mental and emotional breakdown. So in the end, nothing is black and white and the reader must make up their own minds on these issues. For his part, Mark Mills has given us a tremendously good story.
Six of us attended the Harper Collins evening at Central Library, Halifax, where Tiffany Murray, Mark Mills and Patrick Gale were discussing and reading from their novels. Craig Bradley, the Reader in Residence for Calderdale, was on good form interviewing the three authors. They got a good rapport going which made for lively discussion. They talked about books which had influenced them and books which they would recommend, and the part that reading had played in their growing up.
Their book recommendations included:
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven – Sherman Alexie
The Corner that Held Them – Sylvia Townsend Warner
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
Victory – Joseph Conrad
In Youth is Pleasure – Denton Welch
No Name – Wilkie Collins
Disgrace – J.M.Coetzee
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