How To Build a Boat is a contemporary Irish novel that deals with people in a community navigating lives complicated by things that have happened or are happening to them, in this case a 13 year old boy Jamie is starting high school and it’s clear he is being singled out by some of the mean boys (and not for his height or bright red hair).

The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023 and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2023, both of which announce winners in late November.

In a way it reminded me of Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, in the sense that it relates to the power of connections in the community, the unexpected and the previously unknown, that can help pave the way towards healing and the passing through of the tumultuous hallways of grief.

Old God’s Time is more introspective and focused on a single character, while How To Build a Boat gives equal weight to a number of characters, there is more dialogue and a greater sense of place, of the physical environment and dwelling places of its inhabitants.

How can I miss someone I have never met? Jamie said.
Grief was profoundly different for both humans. One felt an intense anger he had never recovered from, the other knew something was missing, a vacuum to where a mother should fit, and he had a fixed determination to fill it.

Jamie’s mother Noelle died post childbirth at the age of 15 and he is being raised by his young father Eoin and grandmother. He takes everything literally and is serious minded and ambitious.

Jamie got it. He just didn’t want to get it. Noelle had never stopped moving from the first minute he had met her on screen. She was in constant and limited motion.

His one resounding ambition is to invent/create a machine that will be in perpetual motion; in his mind it will somehow allow him to remain connected to his mother, who, though he never knew her, he visualises through the one remaining video that is left of her, competing in a swimming gala.

There had been hundreds of clips. Noelle laughing after school. Noelle walking in the woods. Noelle soaked to the skin on a picnic. Noelle pulling faces outside the cinema. Noelle painted like a Dalmatian at Halloween with a black-and-white hair wig. But after a rare night out with the soccer club, Eoin, angry and lonely and drunk in his small, dark living room, deleted the phone’s contents. After which, he placed his phone on the laminate floor of the two-up-two-down and smashed it hard under the heel of his foot. After which, he vomited. After which, he passed out until morning when he woke frantic and pacing about with a dry mouth and a pounding headache, and in a lather of sweat and overwhelmed with the desire to disappear. But Jamie woke, crept downstairs and began asking so many questions that Eoin had no choice but to recover and get on with the getting on a young boy requires. And for years after, Eoin replayed each deleted clip in his mind before he’d fall into a fretful sleep, until the clips grew so hazy and faint and there came a time when Eoin couldn’t visualise Noelle’s face at all,
and though he tried to (re)build it:
smile, red hair, eyes, freckled nose, wide shoulders
parts of her vanished until it was finally impossible to recreate her.

At the new school he encounters Tess (Mrs McMahon) the English teacher and Taigh (Mr Foley), the woodwork teacher, whose classroom has been built in what was the old swimming pool.

These two are also in the midst of transition; Tess is married to Paul who has little patience or empathy for his wife’s uncertainty. She has come to the end of being able to suppress her feelings and knows that running away is no longer a sustainable solution to her agitated, easily triggered mind.

They were almost a decade married now and to avoid misinterpretations in the way they communicated, they had grown polite and consistent with each other. To Tess, it was as though she had catapulted. She stopped giving Paul her point of view. And Paul stopped worrying about what ailed Tess.

Taigh has left the island where he was raised and keeps his distance from people, avoiding growing close to anyone while he adapts to his newfound independence.

The three are connected through the school and Taigh’s suggestion to Jamie that they build a currach (a traditional Irish boat with a wooden frame, over which animal skins or hides were once stretched, though now canvas is more usual).

It is a school project that a number of the boys work on and commit time to, though not necessarily supported by the very traditional, linear leadership or parents with single-minded expectations of their protege. The project in different ways facilitates consideration of the many pressures weighing on them all.

It is a heart-warming, thoughtful novel of the importance of community interactions and the power of imagination and creativity and teamwork to nurture and heal and progress the journey of everyone involved, when obstacles are removed and the way is cleared for out of the box thinking, support and the healing that can result from going with the flow.

I thought it was an excellent, enjoyable, thought provoking read of hope and optimism.

Further Reading

Elaine Feeney Booker Interview: ‘It’s impossible not to consider pain and loss when writing’

New York Times Review: Grief, Community and Boat Building in a Moving New Novel, In Elaine Feeney’s latest book, a child’s grief-driven engineering dream connects a handful of isolated citizens in a small Irish town by Sophie Ward.

The Guardian: How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney review – secret shame and practical woodwork by Killian Fox.

Elaine Feeney, Author

Elaine Feeney is an award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright from the west of Ireland.

How to Build a Boat, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023, is her second novel. The 2020 debut, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award.

Feeney has published three collections of poetry, including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story ‘Sojourn’ was included in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Feeney lectures at the National University of Ireland, Galway.  

” I am constantly imagining and reimagining this place; its socio-economics; geo-political landscape; pagan versus Christian traditions; new cultures; power and who holds it; the post-colonial effect on language, emigration, class and agriculture. Our proximity to the sea seems to energise writers.” Elaine Feeney on Ireland