This severe creature of "five foot eleven, with black-rimmed glasses. Moira is clearly a puzzle to her conventional parents. The truly dark pulse of this narrative lies not so much in the foreshadowed tragedy as in the narrator's psyche. Hear the handclap of birds as they dived into the water, and the burr of puffin flight." The squill and furze would shake on the headland.
She writes of "salt, and wind, and the pop of mussel breath. However, she surmounts an overstretched motif with an oddness and richness of language, a tilting of reality at times reminiscent of Jeanette Winterson's skew-whiff vision in Lighthousekeeping, that delights with its virtuosity. To use a marine theme so dominantly is a risky undertaking, fraught with the enticement of cliché: in following a long line of greats from Shakespeare to Melville to Murdoch, Fletcher also adopts the preoccupation of many lesser writers who thrill to the sea's obvious descriptive opportunities.
The sea is a constant presence in the book: an obsession, a metaphor, a source of desire and danger. It is to Amy that this novel is addressed in poignant second-person asides, the use of prolepsis thickening as the story progresses. That's about it, but what carries us along and provides a disturbing undertow is our early knowledge that Moira's younger sister Amy will fall from a rock and lie in a coma. The novel follows Moira Stone from her early days immersed in the landscape of the Pembrokeshire coast to her time at boarding school, her jealousy at the birth of her sister, and her marriage to a man she meets in her teens. Why is Moira close with Til when she is so emotionally remote with her parents?Īlthough Moira is telling the story of her own life to Amy, she frequently refers to herself in the third-person.A study of loss, regret and the perverse complexities of human love, Oystercatchers is psychologically profound, but at its surface lies a simple tale that eschews the mystery element of its predecessor. How does the relationship of the brothers Ray and Stephen mirror that of the sisters Moira and Amy?
What choice is Moira making when she takes a sip from the shampoo bottle in her dormitory?ĭiscuss the symbolism of water throughout the novel. How does her parents’ perceived betrayal in sending her to boarding school affect Moira’s interactions with others as she matures? Why does Moira feel she needs to recount her story to Amy? Would she have done so if Amy hadn’t had her accident?Īre Moira’s suspicions that she is the less loved of her parents’ two children founded?
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