To The Last Page

Divided into four short parts, Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea appears to be a relatively simple and straightforward character study of three different people who we are led to believe will come together and connect in some way in the final part of the book. If that sounds like the novel is in reality three short stories that are tenuously linked together for the sake of novelistic purposes, in reality the technique actually captures something deeper about the nature of human experience, about life and the things that connect us all. The stories of Farouk, Lampy and John do however all appear to take place in complete isolation from one another. Certainly Farouk’s experience as a Syrian refugee is at least very different from the other two who live in the same part of the world around Limerick in Ireland, but the society and even the time period that Laurence (Lampy) and John don’t make it seem that they are likely to connect. Come together in a tragic situation they do however,...