Garrett Carr on help he received from old fishermen when writing The Boy from the Sea.
The Boy from the Sea unfolds over twenty years and is about a fishing family called the Bonnars. It begins when a baby is found abandoned on the shore near their town and the Bonnars adopt him, but this leads to years of trouble. The Bonnar’s original son refuses to accept his new brother and they develop a rivalry, a rivalry that deepens as they grow into men and threatens to destroy them both completely.
The Boy from the Sea is set in the town where I grew up, Killybegs, Co Donegal. I am the son of a fisherman. When I began writing I was looking forward to a project that wouldn’t require much research – I’d just have to sit about remembering – but I soon realised there was a lot to learn, especially for the scenes at sea: I was going to have to find out about working on trawlers. I got in touch with fishermen from my father’s time and they kindly answered my many questions. Some sent me photographs of the Killybegs fleet during the 1970s and 80s, when the novel is set. Decades old and shot on film, the pictures are not quite sharp and glow with that warm saturation you often see in photos from the time. I love that the novel’s cover photograph has the same kind of glow – it really evokes the world of fifty years ago.
Fishermen also sent me black and white photographs and among them I made a surprising find, a photo of own my father’s trawler, the Ville de Port Louis. My thanks to Paddy Roche for sending it. The Ville de Port Louis was wrecked when I was very young, I have only the haziest memories of it and this is the only photograph I have. Thanks to the photo I discovered that my father’s trawler was a little bigger than I thought – and bigger than the trawler I have given Ambrose Bonnar in The Boy from the Sea. One thing is still beyond me though: a lack that might say something about the limits of research as well as the limits of memory. The trawler’s colours are lost to me, I still don’t know what colour the Ville de Port Louis was painted.
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