Where I End

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Three generations of women live together on a remote island. Nineteen-year-old Aoileann is friendless and unschooled: “My body grew but my mind stayed small.” She despises the “cowed and crumbling” islanders, who believe she is cursed. Given what is revealed about her history, this attitude seems implausible until it becomes clear that the island, while geographically similar to Inis Meáin, is more like The Upside Down in Stranger Things: a malevolent inversion, run on suspicion and distrust. I do think this book may be a hard read for people who are family carers, and therefore I wouldn't recommend it to these people. There are some moments in this that made me so uncomfortable due to the way Aoileann and her grandmother treated her mother - they kept her as comfortable as possible, and cared for her in the way they knew how but there were moments that made you truly wonder if she was trapped in a terrible silent prison of her own self. And as Aoileann's obsession deepens, her behaviour towards her mother becomes more resentful and cruel.

A small and well-defined central cast of characters held sway over this story, with their dour and brooding persona and aura of impending doom. They were all pretty uncompelling, disturbing, loathsome individuals, and not one of them did I have any real empathy with, or sympathy for. Yes! They were definitely given a strong voice with which to tell their story, however it got to the stage where I simply couldn’t trust a single word which came out of any of their mouths! At best they were complex, volatile and unreliable, at their worst they were manipulative, duplicitous and malevolent. Every time I had the slightest urge to feel even slightly sorry for any one of them, within seconds they had said or done something else to have me seething and truly angry with them, all over again. A cast of ‘extras’ were alluded to, but thankfully didn’t appear in any important capacity, as I don’t think I could have stood the strain. I'd like to remember this book through the 3 main "themes", I guess, that stood out to me, using a quote that encaptures each. By the time the first census was recorded, the mainlanders had settled on more ho-hum aversion: the islanders were ugly; they were poor; their Irish was incomprehensible. In spring 1931, the island was home to 187 souls. About ten families, all fishing and living a spartan existence.

As a long-term Creep™, I thought I had a fairly good on handle on how dark Sophie could go. I greatly underestimated her, and while I really liked her other books, I feel like this is it, this is what she can write better than anyone else. The horror of humanity.

Aoileann and Móraí, her taciturn grandmother, spend their days secretly tending to “the bed-thing”, Aoileann’s mother, the survivor of a private disaster. Aoileann loathes her mother, a hatred manifest in endless daily cruelties. It has been decided that the island “if it were to persist in being so useless to the mainland must earn its keep in tourism”, so an old factory is being turned into a museum. When artist-in-residence Rachel arrives with her baby son, Aoileann finds a focus for her perverse understanding of love. Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love.

Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love... When artist Rachel arrives on the island with her young son, Aoileann befriends her and begins to make herself indispensable in Rachel’s life.

It's also human, and raw, and describes the horror and fear of motherhood better than anything I've ever read. The house in which Aoileann is at the furthest, least accessible, part of the island and its windows have been boarded up with stones. Aoileann lives with her paternal grandmother, an islander, who she calls Móraí, and her mother, originally from the mainland. But no-one on the island knows that her mother is there, believing her to have died around the time Aoileann was born, and she is bed-bound and dumb, seemingly in some form of permanent post-natal depression, and is treated by Aoileann and Móraí as little more than an animal, or perhaps, even worse an object. Encountering her is physically overwhelming. My body is opening to her with an exuberance I don't recognize. Her body arouses in me the same sense of altered state that the ocean does."Aoileann’s every word, thought and deed, oozed hatred and malignant, malevolent intent. However, this was beautifully balanced and nuanced against some barely discernible and well disguised moments of loss and longing, as she searched for that illusive something she knew she had lost, or maybe never had, knowing it had left her damaged and somehow incomplete, whilst at the same time her awakening femininity saw her trying to disseminate and come to terms with her own sexuality. It seems useless to even try in this hateful place. The thing in the bed may even have the right idea: to succumb, to beg, to be ended. The thing in the bed is maybe privy to something. Or perhaps is just more willing than the others to face what this place is capable of. With bloodless, spidery hands, Islanders drew the frightened near-drowned from the shore and led them up to the island’s interior. Where I End by Sophie White is likely to be one of the last books I read in 2022, and is certainly the most viscerally powerful and disturbing. Meanwhile Aoileann's father lives on the mainland and visits once a month and while he is aware of his wife's condition Aoileann and her grandmother put on a show that they take better care of her:

During the early chapters, I found myself musing that there were parallels between this book and The Colony by Audrey Magee, with both set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland and featuring a resident artist character. I think they make good companion reads but do steel yourself for some seriously disturbing content. As the story opens, Aoileann is approaching the age when she has been told she will have to assume primary care for her mother, particularly as her grandmother has a new job in a folk museum opened by those from the Mórthír, to attempt to bring some tourism to the island. Aoileann becomes determined to do something to prevent this becoming her life but also is determined to discover exactly what happened to her mother to make her this way, why the islanders view her as accursed, and why 'the bed-thing' has worn its fingers to bloody stumps of bone attempting to scratch messages into the floor.Aoileann lives on the most rural part of a small, hostile island, cut off from the local community. Her paternal grandmother rules the roost; her shattered, guilt-ridden father comes and goes; and her mother - or what's left of her - lies bed-bound, silent, staring, gaping. They are survivors of a devastating catastrophe; an incident that has made them outcasts, despite being islanders themselves. Once Aoileann has worked out a plan, she decides that she is going to manipulate the situation so that she is able to leave the island with Rachel when she goes – Will she be able to adapt to mainland living, or is her mental health too badly damaged? And will Rachel live (or die) to regret her decision? This book is that feeling in words. It's visceral. It's stomach churning. It's horrifying. It's dread, and damp, and stale, and fusty. Aoileann has never encountered a Mother or Mothering. There are references to her heartbreaking younger attempts at mother-daughter interaction with the "bed-thing", and how that connection was never found with Móraí either. Aoileann has grown up never witnessing closehand a Mother, or a woman's existence. She's taken in with Rachel, like sea-swimmers are with the bite of the ocean. Islanders pulled grateful survivors from the sea,’ the stories said. ‘Saving them from drowning only to deliver them to a worse end.’