The Booker Review

“I asked her: ‘But why are they here?’ To which the answer was the Big Bang, which was not an answer, because the Question of Questions wasn’t ‘Why are there stars in the sky?’ but rather ‘Why is anything anywhere?’”

One Boat is a book that deals with Big Questions. A bereaved woman retraces her footsteps through a Greek village from another visit some years earlier: contemplating consciousness, finding connection. The mood is melancholy and pensive, and a bit bleak. The characters she meets and re-meets are maybe part of each other’s greater story, maybe not.

The overall atmosphere is very ‘meta’, in the sense that we are observing a woman observing her own mundane notes taken while observing others – not so much a story, even, as a vague waft of vignettes. She seems lost in introspection. Wrestling with questions to which there are no answers and in which most people aren’t that interested, she watches the people around her with intrigue and perhaps a little disdain, bathing in the silliness of village life and petty politics.

Her philosophising, too, quickly rises to the level of absurdism. “Which is sillier, she asked: Thinking that fish have feelings, or thinking that allowing a female goat to graze on the holy mountain would take something away from the glory of the Virgin?”

Well, quite.

None of these thoughts are really novel, though – fun fact: Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi was already pontificating about whether fish in the Hao river could feel joy in the 4^th century BCE – but maybe that’s sort of the point, that she’s so stuck in her head wrangling with these unanswerable questions that she’s missing the present entirely.

There’s usually a single Booker choice each year that just makes me go, “…Huh?” This was that one. One Boat is one of those lofty works that makes me feel as if the narrative is taking place on some higher plane of existence, like a blend of spices too nuanced for my amateur palate. Often the critics rave about such books, while I feel stuck in some alternate dimension where the plot is craftily labelled ‘The Emperor’s New Storytelling’. Maybe that makes me uncultured, but at the end of the day I read for enjoyment, and I didn’t enjoy.

One thing I did like, from this tiny textbook-esque almanack of living, was the narrator’s observations on the life of dogs: “Watching him lapping the water up, I uttered some banality about living in the moment – we observe life, I said, but animals live wholly within it.” Banalities are often mundane because they are true, and it reminded me of the aphorism about the past and future not really existing – that only the present is real. Our narrator, Teresa, demonstrates this rather finely by spending all of her time reminiscing about her past and contemplating what she ‘will’ write in the future. We would probably all do well to be reminded of this, from time to time.