"Falling Animals" by Sheila Armstrong

 A man is found dead on a beach near a small town in Ireland. He seems to have died of natural causes; he's riddled with cancer. No-one knows who he is: there are no identifying papers, even the labels have been cut from his clothes. 

The narrative works towards a solution to this mystery by telling the stories of the members of the community, from their perspective but in the third person. It is like a collage or a mosaic. Some of the stories interlink but, in the end, it is up to the reader to assemble them to see the whole picture. It's a clever device which reminded me of The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan, another book set in the fallout from the Irish financial crash of 2008. But I am encountering so many collage-style narratives that I have decided to include them in a page on this blog. 

Another dimension to this mystery is the feeling that a number of the narrators have of some supernatural presence on board the boat.

The title comes from a memorial built to commemorate those who have died at sea, and those who have lived at sea but died elsewhere, such as the body on the beach. A plaque on the memorial says: “For those fallen at sea and those still falling.” (3: the dead)

The final section is entitled 'the dead' in what I presume is a homage to James Joyce whose final story in Dubliners is also entitled The Dead.

There are some wonderfully lyrical descriptions, such as “The sunsets smear themselves across the sky and drown themselves in the temperamental sea.” (2: the artist) 

Selected quotes:

• “Out over the deep water, the dawn light is stretched out and thin ... Further out, the tent pole of a lighthouse props up the sky.” (1: the collector)
• “There are leapers and creepers, he once told her: those who get it over with in one go, and those that creep into the water, step by step, letting each part of their body adjust.” (1: the witness)
• “There will be another argument between them this evening, as inevitable as the rising sun, and like the sunlight, it will touch on everything but move nothing.” (1: the doctor)
• “There was something about him, as if the landscape was there to frame him instead of the other way around.” (1: the son)
• “At the edge of the village, land meets air meets sea, and a handful of buildings shy away from the cliffside to cradle a half moon of grass.” (2: the cook)
• “It's silhouettes that are unique - the shadow the person casts, what they look like behind the window, the shape they make against the backdrop of the landscape.” (2: the artist)
• “Even in an industry where people are treated as things, there are some who manage to treat them as less than that.” (3: the priest)
• “She is as proud as a cat and as untidy as a dog.” (3: the daughter)
• “We watch the others who come now, hidden away in too-small boats, seeking refuge. They pay dearly for hope, but bodies are money and money is bodies; this has always been the way of it.” (3: the dead)

August 2025; 226 pages

First published in GB by Bloomsbury in 2023

My paperback edition issued in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Spoiler alert: The story told section by section

Part One:

• the collector describes a man retrieving for incineration the carcase of a seal from the beach.
• the witness is Oona, who discovers the body and later talks about it in the bar.
• the doctor, the pathologist, who is puzzled by why the man died.
• the son is Mitchell, an American living in the village with his mother who has MS. He saw the man, still alive, sitting on the beach.
• the driver, Darragh, drove the bus on which the man arrived at the village. He remembers he had a purple backpack.
• the wanderer is Yousef who found the backpack in a bin and took it.

Part Two:

• the seaman is a Filipino crew member on the boat that was shipwrecked in the bay.
• the cook was galley chef of the wrecked ship. She stayed in the village to run the cafe. 
• the firestarter, Donal, went out the the wrecked boat and lit a camp-fire. This ignited the remaining fuel and the wreck burned.
• the diver, Robert, has a panic attack swimming down the the wreck.
• the artist is Mitchell's mum. She has MS but is trying to paint what she thought she saw creeping to shore as the wreck burned. She prmoises to paint the cook's memory of her dead daughter.
• the barman is Matias. His father expelled him from his home in Colombia because he was gay and he wandered the world. An inheritance meant that he could buy the bat and he hopes to marry his live-in boyfriend Donal.

Part Three:

• the widow is a Polish madwoman who claims that the man whose body was found was her husband. He wasn't.
• the guard has worked on this case for years. He takes Donal's confession of starting the fire but rips it up.
• the priest works at the Seaman's Mission. He took confession from the man whose body was discovered.
• the fallen. Gunnar worked on the ship when it was bought by Iceland from the Russians to patrol their waters during the Cod War. He died trying to stop the anchor chain from rattling while the man whose body was found looked on, unable to help.
• the daughter is the doctor's daughter. She fancies Mitchell.
• the dead are those on the memorial.