The Shore
Sara Taylor
[William Heinemann]
Sara Taylor’s debut novel The Shore is a sultry, brutal, and brooding window into the lives of the women of The Shore, an isolated, poverty-stricken, yokel-ridden island off the coast of Virginia. Segmented into smaller chapters, The Shore follows the plantation owners, Indian women, weather mages, and meth dealers over the course of 300 years. We open with 13 year old Chloe, living with her addict father, buying chicken necks in a store to go crab-fishing; we finish with Chloe cutting his throat to stop him murdering her little sister. In the middle, things only get nastier.
Southern gothic through-and-through, Flannery O’Connor is the most obvious touchstone here (with hints of Donna Tartt’s own crack at the genre, The Little Friend). Nonetheless, Taylor switches genres adroitly, with a magical realist take on a family who control the weather and a sci-fi-inspired apocalyptic future where (some of) the inhabitants of the islands, by virtue of their isolation, survive a deadly plague. Yet despite the continual moves through time, genre, and character, the novel is unified by a deep and palpable love for the American South. Taylor beautifully captures both faded antebellum elegance and miserable, crushing poverty. Her portrayal of the women of the islands is an unflinching exploration of femininity, power, and the lack thereof. Womanhood here takes many forms: motherhood, murder, submission, escape. This can make for a difficult read, at times; in particular, a graphic (though not gratuitously so) rape scene had me wincing as I read. One woman is thrown into a fire and blinded, while another is repeatedly beaten and eventually murdered by her husband. Life is miserable and frequently short, and yet Taylor’s elegiac prose lends a sort of poisonous beauty to the paths her women take through life, illuminating their strengths and struggles. The Shore, more than anything, is an exploration (and celebration) of womanhood in a misogynistic world, a paean to the feminine power to endure, survive, and eventually, to thrive.
Words: Aisling O’Gara
