Sara Baume: A tale of pleasant isolation in West Cork
Sara Baume with her dog Tove on Long Strand, Co Cork, Ireland. Picture: Kenneth O Halloran
Sara Baume is a woman of many talents. As well as being an acclaimed author, she continues to pursue a parallel career as a visual artist. Perhaps clairvoyance should also be added to the list of her accomplishments.
In her new novel, Seven Steeples, couple Bell and Sigh and their two dogs retreat to a rented farmhouse beside a mountain in West Cork where they cut themselves off from the outside world, immersing themselves in the mundane rituals of living.
It is a beautifully-written, hypnotic and thought-provoking book that echoes how during lockdown we retreated into our homes and ourselves. However, it turns out that the book was written when the pandemic and lockdown was, for the general population, an inconceivable prospect.
“I finished it in 2019, more or less…I did make changes and edits in the last two years but it was more or less a fait accompli by 2019,” says Baume. “I started it before handiwork, my last non-fiction book, which is very much part of the same universe. Both of them were written without any foreknowledge of the coming pandemic.
"Seven Steeples ended up being very relevant. I think it’s funny how people will relate more than ever to this tiny domestic universe and trying to find some solace in doing the same thing at the same time at every day.”
Like Bell and Sigh, Baume and her partner Mark live in a rented farmhouse in West Cork with their two dogs. Seven Steeples also covers seven years in Bell and Sigh’s relationship — Baume and her partner were in the seventh year of their relationship when she began to write the book.
“I started the book when I had been in a relationship for seven years, so I felt like I could talk about a seven-year relationship, I kind of knew what happened then. There was also this thing about the seven-year itch… around that time, our friends were either breaking up with their partners or getting married. And then there is the other thing that the body renews itself every seven years, that every cell is regenerated or something… I was aware of all those things.”
Baume ended up neither splitting up with her partner nor getting married. “Yeah, the end of the story is that it has now been 11 years and we are still together,” she laughs.
Beyond such similarities, however, Baume stresses that Seven Steeples is not about her own life — in fact, it is the first book she has written in the third person.
“I knew it would be impossible to disentangle my own life and my own relationship with this book but things always start being based on truth, then you find a more interesting version of the truth and you start stretching things to an extremity. For example, Bell and Sigh go to live in the countryside and they completely cut themselves off from friends and family and delete their email addresses.
"Mark and I went to live in the countryside but we didn’t cut ourselves off. So it is all the time a kind of a tweaking and a straining of reality. It is always embarrassing when the book comes out and you think people are probably assuming it to be true. It’s true and it’s not true.”
While Bell and Sigh’s relationship could be seen as a romance, there is also an unhealthy co-dependency at play.
“I have seen a few previews on Goodreads and stuff like that and people interpret it as a love story. For me, it was darker than that,” says Baume. “It is going to be so hard to talk about the book without giving away the end, is it a good ending or a bad ending? I am not sure, is it a good or a bad thing that we lose ourselves in relationships, lose a sense of our individual selves?”
Baume is currently undertaking a residency at the Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen, where among many things, she is continuing work on creating a series of miniature ships. After her second book, A Line Made by Walking, she said she no longer felt compelled either to write or to continue to pursue the conventional career path of a writer. She went on to write handiwork and Seven Steeples, so how does she feels now?
“Every time I finish a book, I’m like, ‘that’s it, that’s my last book’. I don’t feel like that now but it is very hard to predict the future, in any sense. I don’t know what the next book is yet and I’m in no rush. Poor Tramp Press, my publishers, publish very few books anyway, so I feel like I’ve clogged up their list for the last number of years. I need to give them a break.”
At one point during the interview, she issues quite a gentle reprimand to the couple’s Border Collie Tove — named after the Finnish author of the Moomins series, Tove Jansson.
“She is eating some kind of plant that is possibly poisonous. I think she has decided I’ve been on the phone too long, she is like a child.”
As well as its natural beauty, West Cork is also famous for reputedly being one of the safest places to be if nuclear war breaks out.
“I don’t know how true that is but there is still very much a legacy of that here, the English people that came over in the ’70s, the Germans and Dutch, because of that," says Baume. "I was wondering about that lately, I think it is to do with the prevailing south-westerlies. I hope it’s true. As my partner was saying, at the moment, it’s like apocalypse upon apocalypse upon apocalypse, a pandemic, a war and climate change. I’m very catastrophic, I think I will probably live to see the end of the world but that is a whole other discussion.”
- Seven Steeples, by Sara Baume, published by Tramp Press, is out now
- Holding, Graham Norton: Recently adapted for television, the chat show host’s debut novel was set in the fictional town of Duneen but there is no doubt that Norton was inspired by his own experience growing up in Bandon and his sojourns at his second home in Ahakista.
- After the Silence, Louise O’Neill: The Clonakilty-based author of the acclaimed Asking For It took on the crime genre in this story of a team of documentary makers who arrive on a West Cork island to investigate the murder of a woman ten years earlier.
- Run Time, Catherine Ryan Howard: Another ingenious high-concept thriller from the pen of Cork writer which is out in August. The plot centres on the filming of a psychological horror in a remote West Cork location.
- A Quiet Tide, Marianne Lee: Lee blends fact and fiction in this mesmerising tale based on the life of Ireland’s first female botanist Ellen Hutchins, who catalogued more than 1,000 species of seaweed and plants from the coast around her native Bantry.
- Falling for a Dancer, Deirdre Purcell: This romance published in 1993 was set in the Beara peninsula and became a BBC series, featuring an appearance by a very young Colin Farrell.
