Spill Simmer Falter Wither: A Rooney Prize-Winning Irish Literary Novel – A Poignant Tale of an Outcast and His Dog

Beautifully written; Disturbing to its core, especially disturbing that so young an author understands so deeply social isolation, loneliness and despair.From Sara Baume's Prologue:"He is running, running, running. And there’s no course or current to deter him. There’s no impulse from the root of his brain to the roof of his skull which says other than RUN. He is One Eye now. He is on his way."She is telling us about the rat terrier One Eye. The inexorable rush to destiny also applies to the 57-year-old motherless child who casts his lot with One Eye.Ray needed a rat terrier. He found One Eye but only after a badger found the dog first.Why he needed the terrier is a complex question. He had rats, to be sure. Why he had rats is for the reader to discover. One Eye had no one. Ray had no one. Then they had each other."I summoned every last dot of valour I could scratch from my soul, I swallowed a shot glass of rescue remedy and went to the social welfare office. I filled out forms and ticked boxes. I found that continued survival came down to a simple matter of form-filling, a basic proficiency in the ticking of boxes. And because I managed never to miss a box or make an illiterate mark on the bottommost line instead of signing my name, nobody came. And here I am still, and here you are.""My father’s name was the same word as for the small insectivorous passerine birds found most commonly photographed on Christmas cards, with orange-red blushed breasts as though they’ve been water boarded by molten amber and stained for life."Our narrator is never explicitly named, but he is Ray. He speaks to One Eye (and sometimes, seemingly to us) and interacts only with the clerks at the post office and the grocers. He shows One Eye (and thereby us) the circumscribed world in which he lives. And I use "circumscribed" advisedly. He starts and ends his life in a small Irish village, with limited financial resources and no social support. He exhausted his savings account and could have collected rent, but that task, like so many others, seemed too overwhelming."For two years now, the hairdresser hasn’t paid a snip of rent, I’ve only just realised that. She used to post it through the letterbox on the first working day of every month in an envelope that smelled like sweet glue and hand cream. But for the last two years, not a snip. And why would she bother, when the landlord’s disappeared and there’s only his idiot son who won’t notice anyway? And I didn’t notice, did I? So maybe I’m everybody’s idiot after all."Baume peels away each prickly leaf of the whin, painfully, one at a time, as she reveals Ray's secrets.She also gives us a survey of the flora and fauna of the Irish sea coast - Bowerbirds, chamomile, furze, cuckoos, silverweed, nasturtiums, jackdaws and all manner of living things, flaunting their living as Ray tries to hang on. The alliteration abounds: the "grandiosity of grottos." The multitude of Marys meets us around the bend. We smell what Ray smells: black mold, cigarette smoke, old slippers and, Baume tells us, time. Irony abounds. The ever-present radio tells Ray and One Eye about endangered species.This is a remarkable book, not only for the gorgeous language which others have noted, but also for the unmistakably Irish fatalism and folk wisdom contained therein. "Tomorrow, once our slanted slates have collided with the course of the sun, we’ll come back here, I promise."The language brings to mind that wonderful Welsh Marches story by Peter Maughan, who also reveres the plants and animals of Batch Magna, "a place on a road to nowhere in particular," but where the prose trips and trills over the tongue if one reads it aloud. Unlike The Cuckoos of Batch Magna, Baume's book is not one for those who insist on happy endings. Ray says it best when he tells One Eye:"This is the way people survive, by filling one hole at a time for the flightiest of temporary gratifications, over and over and over, until the season’s out and they die off anyway, wither back into the wall or path, into their dark crevasse. This is the way life’s eaten away, expended by the onerous effort of living itself."

Sara Baume’s “Spill Simmer Falter Wither” is a novel with an atypical title, and a not-so-normal story-line. It’s beautifully written, extraordinary descriptive, and flows like a long, sad, poem. The landscape apparently encompasses that of the author’s own home territory, the coastal region around Cork, Ireland.To start, we’re introduced to Ray, a middle-aged man, a self-described “troll”, who “wasn’t right minded”, “wasn’t all there”. It can be surmised that Ray was in fact the victim of an abusive childhood, a boy cloistered away from society by a father who was embarrassed by his son’s apparent physical and mental deformities. We learn that Ray had no memory of a mother, no sense of her ever existing. He’s was erratically home schooled by a neighbor who was charged with his care while his father worked…we don’t really know why he wasn’t at least sent to a “special” school.When Ray's father realized that he could no longer drive due to advancing health problems, he impatiently taught his 40-something year old son how to drive his car, elevating Ray to a position of unpaid, unappreciated chauffeur. Ray complies with all of his father’s whims and needs, he joylessly attends church, and helps his father construct and play board games, being the old man's hobby and passion. He’s attends to his father’s needs on a continuous basis, except for that last time, when he consciously decided not to.From start to finish, we really don’t know a lot about the arc of Ray’s life, before he adopted the dog, ONE EYE...but we do know that he is a naturalist savant. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna that were indigenous to his coastal hometown. Assuming the author was telling this story through Ray’s mind’s eye, then Ray was not as dumb as he perceived himself to be…he viewed the natural world with a magnified sensibility, gleaning precise details of his surroundings in a manner that most of us could only envy. But, he was a man suffering from debilitating sadness, self-aware, afraid of human interaction, a despondent soul.This is not an action packed novel; it’s disconcerting meandering, an “on-the-road” journey for a broken man and his broken dog. They literally escape from the local animal warden, who would have justifiably taken One Eye away from Ray, and most probably put him down for attacking another dog and a child.This is not an uplifting story; Ray is not particularly interesting or lovable. One Eye is certainly not a lovable dog. But despite these pitfalls of plot, Sara Baume’s effort here, the strength of her prose, make it well worth the read.

I pushed myself to finish it although it was really too much of a downer for me. The writing is terrific, though, just wish it could have been more hopeful of a subject.

This book has wiggled its way into my heart. I was afraid to finish it in case the ending was dissapointing...it was a perfect ending. I loved the book so much that I want to buy a hard copy so I can dip into it or lend it to someone who would appreciate it as much as i did. The book is hard to describe but it works on so many levels, so much more than about a dog and a man...the title confused me until I read that the words stand for the four seasons, the four seasons of their adventures, spring, summer, fall and winter.

Lo regalé, me dicen que esta bueno

Very unusual story. Study of neglect and physical handicap. Wonderful evocation of love between man and his dog. Grippy and stark . Great read.

Wonderfully written. But so sad it makes for hard reading. I was scared to read the last few pages. In spite of that, don't miss it!

I cried, cried, cried at the end of this beautiful but devastating book.So well told is it that I knew the house, the yard, the sea and saw inside the lonely, frightened man who feels, understandably, detached from the people around him.His sole companion (and undoubtedly the best in his life), is One Eye, the 'vicious little bugger,' who clearly loves the 'ugly' man who takes him home from the shelter.Ray's understanding and observations of One Eye are one of the highlights of the book - the author clearly loves dogs and this is reflected in the gentleness that Ray shows One Eye (even when he is angry).One Eye joins Ray at a time in his life when he is unraveling, or maybe One Eye triggers this by the events that lead to the arrival of the dog warden.The places they visit are tangible, yet the events are understated and all the more profound because you create the unspoken details.This is not a book I would normally read and, while I cried, I don't regret spending a single moment in the company of the Ray and One Eye. Definitely one of the best books I've read.