One of the great pleasures of reading historical fiction is discovering the questions that linger behind the finished novel: the landscapes that inspired it, the forgotten histories that shaped it, and the quiet decisions that brought its characters to life. Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall is a novel that stayed with me long after I turned the final page, not only for its beautifully rendered island setting, but for its thoughtful exploration of language, belonging, folklore, and the lives of women who so often remain at the edges of history.
I was delighted when Elizabeth agreed to answer a few questions for The Tearoom. In our conversation, she reflects on the real islands that inspired Whale Fall, the role of Welsh language and folklore in the novel, and why historical fiction remains such a powerful way of bringing overlooked lives into focus.
I will be publishing a review of Whale Fall on Friday. Meanwhile, enjoy the interview.
Q: In your Author’s Note, you explain that the island on which Whale Fall takes place is fictional, though inspired by several real islands that were sparsely populated and later abandoned. Could you tell us more about the places that influenced the novel, and what drew you to that setting?
A. There is a recent essay by the landscape historian John R. Gillis which typifies different kinds of people on a shore: those who live on the shore and those who live with it. That line really captured my imagination, thinking about what it means to be tied to a place, what it means to be a visitor. I have a family connection to people who live with the sea and shore: my grandfather’s family lived near the Dingle Peninsula, and my grandmother came from a small coastal village in North Wales. I started to think about their lives, particularly as both had moved to English cities for a better life during the Second World War. I wondered what that passage meant to them.
To build up the world of the island, I read memoirs by people who had lived on Bardsey Island (Wales, not evacuated but mostly uninhabited by around 1960), St. Kilda (Scotland, evacuated 1930), the Blasket Islands (Ireland, evacuated 1953) the Aran Islands (Ireland, not uninhabited/evacuated but featured in a few complicated popular culture sources about islands). In this research, there were familiar themes of isolation, mythologising of the mainland and larger cities, ambition, living alongside nature, and a sense of a way of life disappearing over time.
I also think of the island as a haunted place or places. In the way that many of the islands I was researching underwent significant changes in landscape and weather conditions, I also wanted to think about the island as a stage for playing out our own anxieties around climate, the way nature now symbolises to us a sense of alienation and loss. Islands often symbolize a kind of instability and changeability, due to the fact that their coastlines are often changing, being eroded, and that people are often arriving and leaving. Island communities are often isolated or have a kind of insularity, so that gives an island a particular kind of idiosyncratic culture too. So I was trying to portray a particular place, but also these cultural layers, and what it might mean to be an ‘islander’.
Q: Manod is one of the few English-speaking residents in a village where Welsh is the dominant language. What role did language play in shaping the story, and how did you approach writing about a character who exists between those two worlds?
A: Manod is really caught between two worlds; the English mainland and the Welsh island. Language becomes a way in which she can access the wider world, but learning English also confuses her identity, which is something Llinos understands. Speaking Welsh makes her useful to the visiting researchers but it also becomes a way that they alienate her and see her as different.
I was also interested in dialect, as I had read about certain Welsh and Cornish coastal communities developing particular dialects of their local language. These dialects were able to talk specifically about the landscape; they would have particular words for a certain type of hill, for instance, or the behaviour of the tide. I think we’ve lost this in modern English, and may only encounter that kind of specificity in scientific language rather than ordinary speech. I wonder if this is part of our alienation from nature after the industrial revolution. So, as well as English-Welsh translation, Manod also offers the visitors a lot of local knowledge about the flowers and plants of the island, and the island’s relationship with the landscape is absorbed into the way they express themselves (as also seen in the folk tales!).
Q: Throughout Whale Fall, references to the Selkie myth lend the novel a subtle sense of enchantment. What drew you to weaving folklore into a work of historical fiction, and what did those elements allow you to explore that realism alone might not have?
A: I was interested in how folktales are used to make sense of parts of the world we don’t understand – they are often about death, birth, natural phenomena, transformation – and they come off as magical because they concern themselves with the world’s mysteries, I think. But you’re right in that they are a gift to the writer because anything can happen, which makes them a beautifully creative space, and because they can say so much about a place and time and how people live with it.
I was interested in how the islanders might use folklore to express their relationship to the island, and how their stories may shape themselves around the natural phenomena of the island. So there are selkies, lost men, beached whales, people leaving, because these are all a part of the island’s life.
Q: Much of the novel is told through Manod’s watchful gaze as she observes both the island and the outsiders who arrive there. What interested you about writing a protagonist who is, in many ways, both participant and observer?
A: I felt Manod offered something interesting; somebody who was both knowing and naïve, less clear-sighted than she thought she was, who was caught between different worlds. I wanted the shoreline landscape to shape the people on the island and, thematically, the novel, and in the same way the shore is not-land, but also not-water, Manod is both part of the island’s rich past and its disappearing future, ambitious and held by domestic obligation, using and being used by the visitors. She sits in a kind of in-between space.
Q: The Tearoom is interested in the lives and stories that history often leaves at the edges of the frame. What was it about Manod—and women like her—that you felt was important to bring into focus through this novel?
A: I am also hugely interested in those things! It’s the main reason why I am passionate about historical fiction, because it allows you to imagine the stories beyond the frame of how history is usually told. It was important to me to write a working class character, and to illuminate the ‘glass ceiling’ above her not just as a woman, but as a working class person too. I wanted to portray her as intelligent, complex, and ambitious. Women and working class people are mostly invisible in history, but fiction can reconsider historical events through their eyes. I wouldn’t want to say that I’m able to tell their stories (or that any writer is), but we can reflect on our own times by considering the different ways that people lived.
Q: Are there any books, authors, or works of art that helped shape Whale Fall while you were writing it? I’d love to hear about any influences that informed the novel’s atmosphere, themes, or sense of place.
A: I love writers that tell seemingly simple stories, with a lot of hidden depth. Claire Keegan and Amina Cain were both big influences on my approach to telling the story. I am also drawn to writers who are really detail-orientated, and who can write beautifully about the emotional resonance of particular objects; I keep returning to Liz Berry’s verse novel ‘The Home Child’ for this.
End.
My thanks to Elizabeth O’Connor for taking the time to share these thoughtful reflections on Whale Fall and the ideas that shaped it. Conversations like this remind me that every novel carries with it an unseen world of research, memory, and imagination waiting just beneath the surface of the finished story.
I hope this interview encourages you to seek out Whale Fall for yourself—and, perhaps, to linger a little longer over the landscapes, histories, and overlooked lives that continue to echo long after the final page.
I found your Substack because I was searching for articles by or about Elizabeth O’Connor. I just finished reading Whale Fall and I wanted more! Thank you for reaching out to the author and sharing this interview. What a beautiful book! I was completely sucked in by the descriptions of the island, animals, and sea.