A review by vanityclear
From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

4.0

Another quietly tense novel from Donal Ryan, whose placid, rhythmic writing—like water—disguises the violence and dissatisfaction that lie beneath the surface of a small Irish community. Not quite as good as The Spinning Heart, but similarly attuned to small human moments. I do wish that the three men's narratives had intertwined sooner, but the conclusion was unpredictable and quietly devastating. I'm also waiting for more well-rounded female characters—if I recall correctly, very few of the POVs in The Spinning Heart were women either. The only woman whose head we peer into here is a few paltry pages of an elderly woman lusting after her physical therapist, and a glimpse at Lampy's mother, who is otherwise treated as a sex object and/or object of pity. From what I can tell from the jacket of his last book, All We Shall Know is about the relationship between two women—but it's only initiated by the unwanted, adulterous pregnancy of the main character. Every female character in Donal Ryan's imagination is defined in relation to a man, which is definitely not true of every fucking woman in Ireland. If Donal Ryan's project is to map the discontent of rural Ireland in the rubble of the tiger years, he had best start including women, whose options in 2018 are still even more limited than men's are.