Denis Thériault’s The Boy Who Belonged to the Sea is, as one reviewer described it, “quirky and charming”. It also requires a massive degree of belief suspension if you’re going to navigate through to the end as the distance between reality and what happens in the novel is, at times, a chasm.
I was thrown a little early on in the novel by what seemed to be indiscriminate switching between past and present tenses. Indeed, after and fifty pages or so I considered giving up as it had become so annoying. I don’t know whether this is down to the original or the translation – or, let’s face it, some misunderstanding on the part of the reader!
If someone were to ask me to score the novel on a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’d struggle. I’m guessing I’d pitch it somewhere in the middle – but if you like your fiction “quirky and charming” I could see how you’d want to score it much higher.
Ian Gouge - Writer 