The best-written recent literary fiction: Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan
Read the opening pages below
Sea
The Atlas cast off from Liverpool in March, moving towards Brazil and winter by way of somewhere else, and within moments of leaving behind the estuary she hit her first swell. Angel Kelly, who had been sitting on a hatch watching the black walls of the harbour diminish, felt his face tighten, his lungs shallow and a heat surge through his throat. He understood, then, all at once, that the sea was alive, that it wanted to kill him, and that there were many things the body hated more than extinction, and that the worst of these was seasickness. Confining himself to his private quarters, he prayed for death.
In darkness, he alternated between hammock and floor; sometimes he leant against the wall, drowsing off, other times he curled up in a corner. Tremoring waves of nausea blossomed in the belly, crawled up through organs until, in serpentine reaching, they kissed his eyes, and everything blurred. He would vomit until he passed out, and then would awaken almost immediately to feel the awful ritual already begun again inside him. By the third day, he was vomiting streams of clear liquid into a bucket through his nose, his mouth too fatigued to open. Waterfalls of nausea sluiced up his throat, and he was guided through inner landscapes by the vagaries of a ragged breath. There was a motion to the body that was commensurate with the motion of the sea; a falling, an unfolding, a decompressing, a jarring, the sense that he had been hurled into the wrong part of the universe and was being taught something, through pain, by a being far greater than him.
Sometimes, still awake, he could feel himself moving slowly into dreams, carried on some presence’s back towards a lighted hamlet through a penumbra of tangled forest, dragged about in false spaces that he was powerless to leave. Once he saw a small girl, skin darker than a gypsy’s, laying on her side next to him; her gut had been torn open, exposing a meadow of pink flowers, in which roamed a pigeon that moved like a sea creature. It scuttled and pulsed around the wound, until it came to rest and laid a clutch of eggs along a riverlike bend in her intestine, and from these eggs black saplings hatched and grew. More often she appeared to him intact. She came into his cabin, accompanied by a child he recognised as himself, and then they would hold hands, lower their eyes and pray.
One evening, he woke up and felt within him the sea; it was no longer a thing apart. Lighting some candles, he checked the looking glass. He was much diminished, his skin so pale it was as if he had emerged from the powdered rubble of some ruined city. He tried to unpack some of his papers, and then, immediately fatigued again, he lay down in his hammock to enjoy the gentle thrumming of being alive, the creaturely smell his own skin gave off.
Someone had taken care of him during his lengthy sickness; visiting him frequently enough to replenish his stock of fresh water; emptying his chamber pot of vomit; leaving him biscuits. He couldn’t recall eating any of them, though he remembered once staring down at them formlessly reproduced inside the bucket, wondering how they had gotten there.
He was awoken by the last candle hissing out. He had, at some former point, fallen asleep. The hammock’s ropes creaked slightly, and he stared at his hands, dully blue with darkness, and finally still after so many days of shaking. Moaning wind snuck through the ship checking every cranny, leaving disorder and chill. When the wind hushed, he realised that there was perpetual moaning emanating from the frame of the boat, and that it had been there a long time.
Rolling out of his hammock, he pressed his ear to the wooden floor to hear better the noise trapped within.
A knock throttled his ears, and he pressed his hands against them in pain. Twice more the floor knocked in the exact spot where he had placed his cheek – and then another moan. Someone was calling out, but communicating nothing he could understand, no language he knew.
Terrified, he left his quarters and the shock of the light outside was so fierce that even though he closed his eyes and held his breath, still this light flourished, making his darkness bright like blood, unbearable to witness. The fresh air left him feeling stripped naked and lashed. Invisible bursts of spray scattered across his face and gooseflesh sprang up all along his spine. It was early dawn and the northern star, the last vestige of night, was low in the sky, very near the horizon. Nothing between the grey of the sky and the grey of the sea, the edge of the world blurred. Down by the cockpit, the ember of a pipe glowed with the regularity of a ticking clock, destroying the illusion of grey endlessness. There were shaded forms by the tiller; two sailors on the dawn watch. One of these men moved an enormous heap of ropes from one place to another and was swallowed by a trapdoor. Lines smacked against the hull and creaked upon the sheaves, and above Angel’s head, a man was climbing up the foremast, manoeuvring upwards in the harness he sat in.
It dizzied Angel to see the soles of this man’s feet so far above him and he leant, blinking, across the bulwarks and stared again at the seething membrane of the ocean, and he was almost comforted by how close the perimeters of the horizon were, how narrow the world was, naught but a little sphere flitting through the heavens – it held no secrets.
LITERARY FICTION TITLES CONSIDERED THIS MONTH
Name by Constance Debré
Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn
Sister Europe by Nell Zink
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp
The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce
Audition by Katie Kitamura
A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton
A Hole in the Story by Ken Kalfus
Big Chief by Jon Hickey
Plum by Andy Anderegg
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk
Atavists by Lydia Millet
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
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