Jonathan Buckley

One Boat

(I received an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review).

One Boat tells the story of an English woman, Teresa, and her short holiday to an unnamed Greek town by the sea. A getaway from her life as a corporate copyright solicitor, she intends to use her time to reflect and ponder on the meaning of life after the death of her mother and the collapse of her relationship. During her stay she meets different locals throughout the town and builds up friendships with all of them. 

Nine years later, she returns to the same Greek town, now after the death of her father, with the view to recreate this rejuvenative experience, to reflect on her complex grief, and to write, not a novel (she scoffs at being called a writer), but a journal, for the sole purpose of maintaining a poetic record of her thoughts and experiences.

This Greek town is lovely, and the description of the setting is my most positive reflection regarding this novel. Buckley depicts the heat and the languidness and the freedom of a Mediterranean holiday perfectly. The flaneur-like wandering through the town, discovering its secret nooks, cafes, peaks, museums, and people—it’s a lovely tribute to the restorative power of rest, and the book would make a perfect holiday read in warmer climates. 

Another interesting aspect of the novel was due to the nine-year gap in time between visits, Buckley plays around with chronology, shifting back and forth between the town and townsfolk who were versus the town and townsfolk now. The change is what you would mostly expect, though things have become less a ‘hidden oasis’ and more of a tourist trap, and old friends who were once filled with the vivacity of youth have now grown more rugged and hardened, the town still remains, the people, moored to the soil, remain, and Teresa visits them both, summoning her latent memories, as memory is so related to place and people, so the novel posits.

The inventive quality of the novel is this ever present notebook where Teresa supplements or replaces her ‘recalled’ narration of an event with the ‘further recalled’ journalling of the event in italics. A random example I’ve picked out: “A museum had been built inside the castle since I was last there. I applied myself to every exhibit and caption — wringing every last drop, I wrote in the evening.” The italicised passage is the written recollection—and through this combination with the regular past-tense narration we experience the event from both Teresa’s immediate and reflective perspective. 

When I saw this happen for the first time at the beginning of the novel I anticipated the novel showing how the actual recollection of an event can be skewed by it’s poetical representation and, perhaps, how in the act of recalling something in a poetic fashion, one can hide themselves from the actualities of life. Unfortunately, I felt nothing but unrealised potential here. Instead, Buckley seemed content with using this experimental form for the sole purpose to write pretty passages that would not normally pass from the narrator’s thoughts at the time. During several parts of the technique drops off entirely or resurfaces only to add one minor phrase per page. For me, the novelty of it wore off very quickly. 

Regarding the prose, I am not the first person to draw parallels to Rachel Cusk’s ‘Outline’, not just because both novels feature English women travelling to Greece to sort out their lives, but also because the highly character-based soliloquy-driven narrative in which mini-stories are extracted from side characters, coupled with an intentional withholding of information regarding the narrator, is very Outline-like. Unlike Cusk, however, characters in One Boat are not writers, artists and poets, but regular everymen, who say as much as they can in the limited vocabulary they have.

Many times, this amounts to saying nothing, and I never felt interested in any of the characters or what they represented. Xanthe, the young waitress turned owner and mother, was a complete non-entity. Niko, the diving instructor lover, is likewise. Petros, the mechanic turned poet, is given the most space in the novel, but mostly uses it to go into long dialogues on animal and plant consciousness, and, later, a long diatribe on ecology. Not that these topics aren’t important or interesting, it just felt like the characters had nothing new to say.

That ‘nothing new to say’ extends, in my opinion, to the novel itself. ‘Platitudinous’ is a word that Teresa mentions herself, reflecting upon some of the thoughts she has summiting one of the mountains. She then comes to a later realisation that language cannot truly describe the experience of true understanding, which is something felt primally, instinctively, in the presence of the sublime. That this revelation is then ironically transmitted through words (in the form of the novel) completely dilutes the overall message. In my opinion, a writer’s goal should be to translate this sublime feeling into an innate philosophical understanding, but what Buckley offers is merely a description of this process being elicited. Many of Teresa’s epiphanies were just words. There was no sense of catharsis through the text itself.

Various other philosophical topics were broached superficially: free will, consciousness, revenge, the breakdown of marriage, art, fascism, but it feels like the novel was too short to give any of these topics justice, and other novels have succeeded here already. It felt like the rough draft or skeleton of a novel, rather than a fully fleshed out work, compositionally.

Despite going in with high expectations and good intentions, I was therefore sadly disappointed with this novel.

There is a question that these cliched passages were cliche intentionally. The ending seems to justify a more experimental read of the novel, and Teresa’s scattered notes could be the mere inklings of something grander, a more fleshed out piece of work. But what would be the point of that? It would be an excellent shield to all criticism of any work, that it is all bad on purpose.

But even if this was the case, I have no interest in unravelling the mystery, say what I would have with a Borges or a Nabokov. There’s no sense of play with the puzzle—the pieces themselves are not fun to grasp with. The experimental nature of the novel is merely like the jigsaw puzzle that reveals nothing but a white square.

shain

(I received an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review).

One Boat tells the story of an English woman, Teresa, and her short holiday to an unnamed Greek town by the sea. A getaway from her life as a corporate copyright solicitor, she intends to use her time to reflect and ponder on the meaning of life after the death of her mother and the collapse of her relationship. During her stay she meets different locals throughout the town and builds up friendships with all of them. 

Nine years later, she returns to the same Greek town, now after the death of her father, with the view to recreate this rejuvenative experience, to reflect on her complex grief, and to write, not a novel (she scoffs at being called a writer), but a journal, for the sole purpose of maintaining a poetic record of her thoughts and experiences.

This Greek town is lovely, and the description of the setting is my most positive reflection regarding this novel. Buckley depicts the heat and the languidness and the freedom of a Mediterranean holiday perfectly. The flaneur-like wandering through the town, discovering its secret nooks, cafes, peaks, museums, and people—it’s a lovely tribute to the restorative power of rest, and the book would make a perfect holiday read in warmer climates. 

Another interesting aspect of the novel was due to the nine-year gap in time between visits, Buckley plays around with chronology, shifting back and forth between the town and townsfolk who were versus the town and townsfolk now. The change is what you would mostly expect, though things have become less a ‘hidden oasis’ and more of a tourist trap, and old friends who were once filled with the vivacity of youth have now grown more rugged and hardened, the town still remains, the people, moored to the soil, remain, and Teresa visits them both, summoning her latent memories, as memory is so related to place and people, so the novel posits.

The inventive quality of the novel is this ever present notebook where Teresa supplements or replaces her ‘recalled’ narration of an event with the ‘further recalled’ journalling of the event in italics. A random example I’ve picked out: “A museum had been built inside the castle since I was last there. I applied myself to every exhibit and caption — wringing every last drop, I wrote in the evening.” The italicised passage is the written recollection—and through this combination with the regular past-tense narration we experience the event from both Teresa’s immediate and reflective perspective. 

When I saw this happen for the first time at the beginning of the novel I anticipated the novel showing how the actual recollection of an event can be skewed by it’s poetical representation and, perhaps, how in the act of recalling something in a poetic fashion, one can hide themselves from the actualities of life. Unfortunately, I felt nothing but unrealised potential here. Instead, Buckley seemed content with using this experimental form for the sole purpose to write pretty passages that would not normally pass from the narrator’s thoughts at the time. During several parts of the technique drops off entirely or resurfaces only to add one minor phrase per page. For me, the novelty of it wore off very quickly. 

Regarding the prose, I am not the first person to draw parallels to Rachel Cusk’s ‘Outline’, not just because both novels feature English women travelling to Greece to sort out their lives, but also because the highly character-based soliloquy-driven narrative in which mini-stories are extracted from side characters, coupled with an intentional withholding of information regarding the narrator, is very Outline-like. Unlike Cusk, however, characters in One Boat are not writers, artists and poets, but regular everymen, who say as much as they can in the limited vocabulary they have.

Many times, this amounts to saying nothing, and I never felt interested in any of the characters or what they represented. Xanthe, the young waitress turned owner and mother, was a complete non-entity. Niko, the diving instructor lover, is likewise. Petros, the mechanic turned poet, is given the most space in the novel, but mostly uses it to go into long dialogues on animal and plant consciousness, and, later, a long diatribe on ecology. Not that these topics aren’t important or interesting, it just felt like the characters had nothing new to say.

That ‘nothing new to say’ extends, in my opinion, to the novel itself. ‘Platitudinous’ is a word that Teresa mentions herself, reflecting upon some of the thoughts she has summiting one of the mountains. She then comes to a later realisation that language cannot truly describe the experience of true understanding, which is something felt primally, instinctively, in the presence of the sublime. That this revelation is then ironically transmitted through words (in the form of the novel) completely dilutes the overall message. In my opinion, a writer’s goal should be to translate this sublime feeling into an innate philosophical understanding, but what Buckley offers is merely a description of this process being elicited. Many of Teresa’s epiphanies were just words. There was no sense of catharsis through the text itself.

Various other philosophical topics were broached superficially: free will, consciousness, revenge, the breakdown of marriage, art, fascism, but it feels like the novel was too short to give any of these topics justice, and other novels have succeeded here already. It felt like the rough draft or skeleton of a novel, rather than a fully fleshed out work, compositionally.

Despite going in with high expectations and good intentions, I was therefore sadly disappointed with this novel.


There is a question that these cliched passages were cliche intentionally. The ending seems to justify a more experimental read of the novel, and Teresa’s scattered notes could be the mere inklings of something grander, a more fleshed out piece of work. But what would be the point of that? It would be an excellent shield to all criticism of any work, that it is all bad on purpose.

But even if this was the case, I have no interest in unravelling the mystery, say what I would have with a Borges or a Nabokov. There’s no sense of play with the puzzle—the pieces themselves are not fun to grasp with. The experimental nature of the novel is merely like the jigsaw puzzle that reveals nothing but a white square.

One Boat

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