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Jonathon Buckley
One Boat (released 30/12/25)
One Boat (released 30/12/25)
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Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
SUSAN'S REVIEW
Until last week, I hadn’t read a single one of British writer Jonathan Buckley’s thirteen novels, although I had heard his work described as “strange” and “enigmatic,” and as driven by ideas rather plot. Not the kind of fiction in other words, that has commercial appeal.
Buckley’s latest novel, One Boat, recently longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, is certainly no page-turner; nor is it easy to convey what it’s “about.” At the literal level and narrated from the perspective of a recently divorced middle-aged woman called Teresa – a contracts lawyer and aspiring writer – the novel details the few days she spends in an unmade coastal Greek village after the death of her father. It also moves back in time, to Teresa’s first visit to the village nine years earlier, after the death of her mother. While this might suggest a focus on the loss of her parents, Teresa is more concerned with loss in the abstract.
One Boat is essentially a philosophical exploration of experiences and phenomena associated with loss and selfhood: the nature of memory, identity, free will and responsibility, told through Teresa’s interior monologues, as well as her dreams and snippets of journal writing (the latter registered in italics). In short, as its title suggests, One Boat explores the human condition: we’re all in the same boat, as it were, trying to find or create meaning from our life-in-time.
Teresa’s attempt to find meaning is revealed in her encounters with the locals she met on her first visit to the village. The handsome young diver, Nico, with whom she had a brief affair, is now happily married with a daughter. Xanthe, a self-contained waitress at the local café, is proud of having taken over the business. Petros, a former mechanic has become a writer of poetry. Teresa also meets a stranger called John, seeking revenge for the brutal killing of his nephew. While the novel reinforces the reality of change, it also implicitly asks whether meaning resides in sex, marriage and the family, in writing, in work, or in a desire for justice. Perhaps the closest it comes to a philosophical conclusion is Teresa’s epiphanic moment on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, when she rejects the possibility that death robs life of its meaning: “My extinction did not appall me. Death was not a deprivation – it would not rob me of anything that was mine … I would be deprived of nothing.” As she gazes at “the uncertain horizon, across the glowing water and the glowing leaves, the elements of the scene lost their separation. All categories and names were lost in the totality of it, dissolved in the light. This is how the episode achieved its climax, in an overwhelming acceptance. An Amen of sorts.” But the scene concludes with Teresa’s return to a more earth-bound reality: wryly describing herself as “the ten-minute mystic,” she conceded that “[t]there has been nothing like it since. Not even ten minutes.” For all its serious exploration of the “big” philosophical questions, the novel refuses to be solemnly high-minded or arrive at definite conclusions about the “meaning of life.”
Other moments of humour guard against the possibility of pretentiousness. Teresa’s former husband Tom, for example, declares that his grandfather had become an anesthetist “because unconscious people were more to his liking … he was as taciturn as an armchair.” Recalling her husband’s infidelity, Teresa’s mother describes the mistress as having “an impressive chest, I grant you. But a banal woman, I always thought.” When Teresa agrees with her mother’s assessment, they “closed the coffin on the subject.” Contemplating her brief affair with Nico, Teresa tells herself that when she finally writes her novel, “[t]here can be no description of what occurred. Representation of the gymnastics would be ridiculous.” Wildean in wit, such sly humour leavens the darkness of Teresa’s doubts about her overreliance on reason and her lack of emotional warmth.
Apart from Teresa, the most interesting character for me is the amateur poet Pedro. Friendless, and mocked by the villagers for his “bad” poetry, his conversations with Teresa range from the nature of consciousness – what might his dog’s thoughts be like and whether a rock can have feeling – to the soothing presence of nature. Nor does Teresa dismiss his poetry; she knows it’s unpolished, but she also finds something appealing in its naïve simplicity. As well, Pedro’s advice to her not to “overthink” is a robust antidote to her highly self-conscious way of being in the world; one which the novel suggests is obstructing her capacity to write fiction. The novel concludes with a scene in which Teresa, returned to her home, is receiving feedback about her work-in-progress, based on her time in the village, from a man we presume is her new partner. Among the various suggestions Patrick gives her, and which she judiciously considers, is to remove all the “dream-stuff” because “dreams are like the contents of the kitchen bin: the rubbish might tell one something about the person who created it, but not a great deal, and certainly nothing crucial.” (I happen to agree with Patrick: I often find the telling of dreams in novels a lazy narrative device for revealing the unconscious, and in real life utterly tedious.) While Teresa initially rejects his argument, she ultimately agrees that her novel needs momentum, a stronger sense of direction: a decision that can be read as a tongue-in-cheek criticism of One Boat itself.
I thoroughly enjoyed One Boat for its philosophical debates, its wit, its elegant sentences and its use of dialogue that conceals as much as it reveals. It’s the kind of novel that requires quiet immersion, and which in its use of interior monologue gives us a more intimate knowledge of a character than we can ever have in real life. It’s a mere convention, of course, but its privileging of complex thoughts and feelings remains one of the reasons I’m drawn to the novel as a narrative form.
PUBLISHER REVIEW
On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast – the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly – her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew.
Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John's; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are.
Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.
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