Book Review: Elaine Feeney's characters will remain with you

Author Elaine Feeney.

• How to Build a Boat 
• Elaine Feeney 
• Harvill Secker, €15.99 

When you finish Elaine Feeney’s new novel How to Build a Boat, it is the characters that will remain with you (less so, the plot). 

Jamie O’Neill is a 13-year-old boy in the west of Ireland. He lives with his father, Eoin, a plumber. His mother, Noelle, died when Jamie was born. 

He has a tendency to obsess about things: a video of Noelle swimming; the Perpetual Motion Machine he wants to create; mathematics. 

Feeney eschews placing any label on Jamie’s head and concentrates instead on immersing us in his digressive, literalist, anxious, determined thought-world. His imperfections are polished and curated by the author into a state of near-perfection.

At his new secondary school, Christ’s College, Jamie encounters two teachers who become his allies. 

Tess Mahon, who teaches English, is living on the edge of her frayed nerves, keeping her head above the waters of a predictably small-minded small town, skirting different emotional abysses, including the one surrounding her father, a lost soul and street-drinker. 

She is subject to all of the slings and arrows of modern-day disenchantment, carefully drawn by Feeney: from the trivial to the life-altering, from takeout remnants swarming the kitchen and Alexa-induced rages to failing IVF, a failing desire to become a mother, and a failing, increasingly venomous marriage. 

Tess “had switched off entirely from looking for any beauty in the world”; her unsteadiness has “made loving herself impossible”.

Tadhg Foley is the new woodwork teacher. An apparent loner, he too is carrying emotional burdens from an island childhood and the fracturing of his family. 

Tadhg is also the one who initiates the project that dominates the latter half of the book: the building of a currach in the school workshop, inspired by Tadgh’s conversations with Jamie.

Feeney has assembled a compelling cast of characters: tormented, even self-tormenting souls. 

The flaw in the novel arises from wedging these damaged outsiders into a bizarre, stop-start confrontation with the local forces of conservatism, coalescing in and around the school. 

How to Build a Boat is given an odd, dual existence as something like an old-fashioned English public school novel of the dystopian variety. 

All the usual archetypes report for duty: an ogreish headmaster obsessed with his own brand of muscular Christianity; supine staff; controlling parents; cruel, obnoxious boys. 

The whole thing is then given a thick coating of Irish Catholicism at its most blood-curdling. It’s 2019, but, inside the school, it is at times closer to the worst versions of 1950 you can imagine.

Jamie is sent to Christ’s College by his father who, in another odd echo of English public school memoirs and fiction, had been there himself as a boarder and had hated it. 

Tadhg bears traces of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society making his first appearance at a pompous ceremony for the beginning of the school year and causing narrow-minded parents to stamp on his efforts to introduce pupils to boat-making (rather than Shakespeare).

Early on we hear that this is a rugby school. Yet, later, a pupil claims he can’t play soccer there because it’s considered “an English game”. 

At whatever cost to logic and verisimilitude, Feeney seems intent on making Christ’s College a paradigm of everything she disapproves of. And there is, we are told, no other school for miles around.

All of this creates the feeling of a different (and inferior) novel trying to co-exist with the story of Jamie and the rest; that the characters are sometimes being manoeuvred about in a fictive assault on toxic masculinity and the like. 

Jamie, one senses, is occasionally pressed into service as a mouthpiece.

The resulting unevenness is a shame, but a poignant, poetic, enigmatic epilogue goes some way to saving the day.