Spill Simmer Falter Wither – Sara Baume (2015)

With Christmas on the horizon, I cast a guilty eye over my tbr and decided I might try and read at least a couple of the books I received as gifts last Christmas. This was one of them, a debut novel of real delicacy, touching and beautifully written in a poetic second person perspective. Baume is a writer who grew up in Ireland, and there’s a beauty and a poetry to her writing that I associate with Irish writing.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a poignant exploration of loneliness and loss and the extraordinary restorative nature of friendship. In this case the friendship is between a man and a dog. Two misfits, cast adrift by the world around them, come together, and find companionship and understanding.

This is the story of Ray; a man in his late fifties, a man too old for starting over and too young for giving up, and One Eye; vicious, small used to being alone, a good ratter. 

“You find me on a Tuesday, on my Tuesday trip to town. A note sellotaped to the inside of the jumble-shop window: COMPASSIONATE & TOLERANT OWNER. A PERSON WITHOUT OTHER PETS & WITHOUT CHILDREN UNDER FOUR.”

Ray lives alone, in what he always thinks of as his father’s house, in a coastal village within sight of the sea. This is where Ray has lived his whole life, saying he hasn’t been anywhere, as he wouldn’t know how to get there. He lives above a hairdresser’s salon and can hear the sound of the dryers through the floorboards, his living room window looks out toward the point where the kids gather in summer by the sea wall. This is a village with just a few shops and a couple of pubs, frequented by twitchers, attracted by the nature reserve it is a place whose population increases during the summer. Bookended by a power station and an oil refinery, the village has been Ray’s world as long as he can remember, and what he mainly remembers is being by himself, when not with his father, and imagining himself in every one of the other houses, in each of them he’d be a different boy. We begin to see early on, that the lonely middle- aged man, has merely replaced the friendless child of the past.

“My sadness isn’t a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop.”

Then one day as spring gets ready to turn to summer, this lonely isolated man, drives to the shelter and comes away with One Eye – named for the one eye he has left. A small, viciously tempered dog unused to the company of humans, who carries on his body, the battle scars of his association with the badgers. Ray puts him in the car, and takes him back to his father’s house, the salmon pink house by the sea, and the first thing One Eye does is try to run away.

“I realise that you were not born with a predetermined capacity for wonder, as I’d believed. I realise that you fed it up yourself from tiny pieces of the world. I realise it’s up to me to follow your example and nurture my own wonder, morsel by morsel by morsel.”

Over the course of the summer these two lonely, frightened creatures come to something approaching an understanding. They explore the beach together, Baume’s descriptions of the Irish coast and the natural world are a delight. These two creatures work as a unit, but One Eye is quite hopeless around other animals and people and Ray finds himself intervening in a couple of potentially disastrous incidents which make him nervous about One Eye’s future in the village. As the summer visitors increase, a violent incident occurs that Ray realises could bring trouble to the door of his father’s house. Terrified of losing his one friend, Ray packs them both into the car, and they take off on a kind of directionless road trip.

Both of them are abused and angry at life – yet together they make sense – and as they travel about, Ray talks to One Eye about his past. His childhood, his father, the only birthday he ever celebrated and the books he loved. In his dreams, Ray becomes One Eye, seeing the world through the eyes of his battle scarred companion.

I don’t really want to say too much more about the plot and certainly not about the end, though I would say to some readers, approach with caution. If bitter sweet is not what you want right now, then save this one for another day. I think I started it thinking that it would probably be a book to tug at the old heart strings, and I was right. I’m not a dog owner, though there have previously been dogs in my family, and I do have a special fondness for them. There is a slight ambiguity in the ending which some readers will find some comfort in. I think it must be testament to Sara Baume’s writing that despite the almost inevitable sadness in this story I never felt too depressed by it.