{"id":24288,"date":"2025-08-26T12:43:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T12:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/24288\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T12:43:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T12:43:08","slug":"review-one-boat-by-jonathan-buckley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/24288\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: One Boat by Jonathan Buckley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There is a moment in One Boat when Teresa, the novel\u2019s narrator, realizes she can\u2019t learn anything more by asking questions. She has hit a wall. \u201cThere was little to be gained by further questions and much to be lost. I could know no more than I knew now, and as I was acceding to this conclusion I noticed, over to our right, to the north, on the horizon of the mountain, a thick smear of smoke sliding slowly away. On cue, another metaphor had been provided: the plot goes up in smoke.\u201d The line is funny, but also a confession of a book that doesn\u2019t believe in plot.<\/p>\n

\"The The view from an island in Greece. (Shutterstock) <\/p>\n

Not much \u201chappens\u201d in Buckley\u2019s novel. A woman travels to Greece twice, nearly a decade apart. She has conversations with locals, remembers old loves, documents the landscape, thinks about her parents\u2019 deaths, and revisits her own grief. That\u2019s it. If anything, the lack of action clears space for what is happening, for example, thought, memory, dialogue, the endless flickering between observation and reflection. Reading it feels like joining an ongoing philosophical conversation. It\u2019s embedded in how people speak, remember, contradict themselves, or tell a story they can\u2019t quite finish.<\/p>\n

\"171pp, 171pp, \u20b9838; Fitzcarraldo Editions <\/p>\n

That word \u201cphilosophy\u201d is important. One Boat carries the spirit of a Socratic dialogue. Teresa recalls her earlier notes, judges them, revises them, laughs at her own phrasing, and in the process, becomes her own interlocutor. She is a reader and writer of her own memories. The people she meets — Petros the mechanic-turned-poet, Niko the boatman, John with his darkness, Xanthe the waitress-turned-owner are counterpoints, arguments, half-answers to the questions Teresa is turning over.<\/p>\n

Buckley lets time drift. Past and present intertwine. A sentence might begin in one visit to Greece and end in another. Sometimes you realize only pages later which year you\u2019ve been in. This can be disorienting, but that\u2019s the point. Memory doesn\u2019t arrange itself in order. It arrives as wisps, as Petros calls them: \u201cIt happens to everyone. Wisps of memory, that was his phrase. Far from troubling him, they gave him great pleasure. They were gifts. The sunlight hits the path in a particular way, as the breeze rattles the leaves of a tree in a particular way, and suddenly, for a second or two, you\u2019re taken to somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n

This could have been sentimental. But Petros\u2019s philosophy that memory is less about truth and more about flashes of recognition feels like the point this novel is trying to being home. Teresa\u2019s notebooks are filled with such fragments \u201cscribbles of white on the blue-black,\u201d \u201cmauve shadows,\u201d \u201cjust one bird visible \u2014 an egret?\u201d They\u2019re partial, sometimes embarrassing to her. But Buckley writes them with such precision. They catch the movement of perception, the act of trying to hold onto a moment as it slips away. One is reminded of Virginia Woolf\u2019s The Waves.<\/p>\n

One Boat feels liberating in the sense that it\u2019s staging what it\u2019s like to live with the fact that you don\u2019t know, can\u2019t know, and maybe shouldn\u2019t know everything. Teresa\u2019s return to Greece after her father\u2019s death feels like letting go of the need for closure. Her conversations with Petros or John make space for grief.<\/p>\n

I kept thinking of Rachel Cusk while reading this because of how much the novel trusts dialogue to do the work of revelation. In Cusk, people tell long stories and, by the end, you see them and the narrator differently. Buckley works similarly. John\u2019s story, spilling out in a dark, continuous monologue, is devastating because Teresa doesn\u2019t know how to deal with it. She listens, but she\u2019s implicated too, caught in the moral and emotional weight of another person\u2019s grief.<\/p>\n

Every character feels like they\u2019ve lived a full life outside the novel, even if Buckley only gives us glimpses. The waitress who now runs the caf\u00e9, the lover who is now married, even the dogs that change between visits, all of them remind us that time has passed, that lives keep unfolding beyond our view. Buckley does a great job at writing about continuity and change without ever hammering the point. People age. They shift. They repeat themselves. They contradict themselves. They feel real.<\/p>\n

And Teresa herself, what kind of narrator is she? For one thing, Buckley withholds her name until almost a third of the way through, and only in passing. It\u2019s a small but effective trick. I couldn\u2019t have guessed the narrator is a woman. You\u2019re forced to listen to her voice before you know who she is. She\u2019s candid, funny, sometimes self-mocking.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also something deeply familiar in Teresa\u2019s half-embarrassed journaling. Anyone who has ever looked back on their old notes, old texts, old drafts of themselves, knows the feeling. \u2018How na\u00efve I was, how dramatic, and yet how right I sometimes managed to be.\u2019<\/p>\n

The Greek town where Teresa returns is described as just an ordinary place. Caf\u00e9s, beaches, conversations, gossip. But through her encounters there like Petros, Niko with his ordinary married life, Xanthe with her caf\u00e9, Teresa pieces together what mourning feels like, what moving forward feels like.<\/p>\n

There will be readers who don\u2019t have the patience for this. They\u2019ll want to know what\u2019s at stake, what\u2019s driving the story forward. But this is not a thriller. It\u2019s not even really a drama. It\u2019s closer to what happens when you sit with a friend over coffee and the conversation wanders. At first it feels aimless, and then an hour later you realise you\u2019ve been talking about the most important things in your life without ever announcing it.<\/p>\n

The novel is full of little failures. The diary entries are fragmentary. Even the title, One Boat, is elusive. It points to the boat in the bay, perfectly placed, balancing the scene. But it also gestures toward the individual life, drifting, alone but not alone, shaped by the sea of others. Consider this- \u201cA boat chugged out of the harbour and we watched it until it halted in the heart of the bay, in a position that might have been determined by its effect on the composition of the scene, so beautifully did it balance the composition.\u201d Is it a metaphor for existence? Probably. Is it too simple? Possibly.<\/p>\n

What struck me most while reading was how emotional the book became by its end, despite its cool, observational style. Petros\u2019s acceptance of memory as \u201cgifts\u201d hit me harder than I expected. Teresa\u2019s repeated returns to the loss of the mother, the father, the marriage didn\u2019t feel like melodrama. They accumulate until you realise the book has been building a philosophy of grief all along: about how to live with it as part of the fabric of time.<\/p>\n

\"Jonathan Jonathan Buckley (Courtesy TheBookerPrizes) <\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to compare this novel to others on the Booker longlist that are more structurally ambitious or politically direct. One Boat doesn\u2019t experiment with language in flamboyant ways. It asks what kind of knowledge memory can give us. It asks what happens when you realise that asking further questions won\u2019t help. And it suggests that the beauty of life might not be in explanation but in wondering.<\/p>\n

The novel can be frustrating too. The drifting timelines sometimes blur into confusion. The diary entries, especially the dream fragments, can ride the risk of self-indulgence.<\/p>\n

If literature is, as I suggested earlier, our modern form of philosophy, then Buckley has quite succeeded in writing a sort of lived philosophy. Reading it, I felt what Teresa feels when she looks out at the sea. That something ordinary can be, for a moment, extraordinary, for it makes you stop, look, and wonder.<\/p>\n

Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a moment in One Boat when Teresa, the novel\u2019s narrator, realizes she can\u2019t learn anything more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24289,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[20415,359,18,117,12364,20012,19,17,18340,20416,7842],"class_list":{"0":"post-24288","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-booker-longlist","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-greece","13":"tag-grief","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-memory","17":"tag-one-boat","18":"tag-philosophy"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}