Review: One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
Not much happens in this novel but reading it still feels like joining an ongoing philosophical conversation
There is a moment in One Boat when Teresa, the novel’s narrator, realizes she can’t learn anything more by asking questions. She has hit a wall. “There was little to be gained by further questions and much to be lost. I could know no more than I knew now, and as I was acceding to this conclusion I noticed, over to our right, to the north, on the horizon of the mountain, a thick smear of smoke sliding slowly away. On cue, another metaphor had been provided: the plot goes up in smoke.” The line is funny, but also a confession of a book that doesn’t believe in plot.
Not much “happens” in Buckley’s novel. A woman travels to Greece twice, nearly a decade apart. She has conversations with locals, remembers old loves, documents the landscape, thinks about her parents’ deaths, and revisits her own grief. That’s it. If anything, the lack of action clears space for what is happening, for example, thought, memory, dialogue, the endless flickering between observation and reflection. Reading it feels like joining an ongoing philosophical conversation. It’s embedded in how people speak, remember, contradict themselves, or tell a story they can’t quite finish.
That word “philosophy” is important. One Boat carries the spirit of a Socratic dialogue. Teresa recalls her earlier notes, judges them, revises them, laughs at her own phrasing, and in the process, becomes her own interlocutor. She is a reader and writer of her own memories. The people she meets -- Petros the mechanic-turned-poet, Niko the boatman, John with his darkness, Xanthe the waitress-turned-owner are counterpoints, arguments, half-answers to the questions Teresa is turning over.
Buckley lets time drift. Past and present intertwine. A sentence might begin in one visit to Greece and end in another. Sometimes you realize only pages later which year you’ve been in. This can be disorienting, but that’s the point. Memory doesn’t arrange itself in order. It arrives as wisps, as Petros calls them: “It happens to everyone. Wisps of memory, that was his phrase. Far from troubling him, they gave him great pleasure. They were gifts. The sunlight hits the path in a particular way, as the breeze rattles the leaves of a tree in a particular way, and suddenly, for a second or two, you’re taken to somewhere else.”
This could have been sentimental. But Petros’s philosophy that memory is less about truth and more about flashes of recognition feels like the point this novel is trying to being home. Teresa’s notebooks are filled with such fragments “scribbles of white on the blue-black,” “mauve shadows,” “just one bird visible — an egret?” They’re partial, sometimes embarrassing to her. But Buckley writes them with such precision. They catch the movement of perception, the act of trying to hold onto a moment as it slips away. One is reminded of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
One Boat feels liberating in the sense that it’s staging what it’s like to live with the fact that you don’t know, can’t know, and maybe shouldn’t know everything. Teresa’s return to Greece after her father’s death feels like letting go of the need for closure. Her conversations with Petros or John make space for grief.
I kept thinking of Rachel Cusk while reading this because of how much the novel trusts dialogue to do the work of revelation. In Cusk, people tell long stories and, by the end, you see them and the narrator differently. Buckley works similarly. John’s story, spilling out in a dark, continuous monologue, is devastating because Teresa doesn’t know how to deal with it. She listens, but she’s implicated too, caught in the moral and emotional weight of another person’s grief.
Every character feels like they’ve lived a full life outside the novel, even if Buckley only gives us glimpses. The waitress who now runs the café, the lover who is now married, even the dogs that change between visits, all of them remind us that time has passed, that lives keep unfolding beyond our view. Buckley does a great job at writing about continuity and change without ever hammering the point. People age. They shift. They repeat themselves. They contradict themselves. They feel real.
And Teresa herself, what kind of narrator is she? For one thing, Buckley withholds her name until almost a third of the way through, and only in passing. It’s a small but effective trick. I couldn’t have guessed the narrator is a woman. You’re forced to listen to her voice before you know who she is. She’s candid, funny, sometimes self-mocking.
There’s also something deeply familiar in Teresa’s half-embarrassed journaling. Anyone who has ever looked back on their old notes, old texts, old drafts of themselves, knows the feeling. ‘How naïve I was, how dramatic, and yet how right I sometimes managed to be.’
The Greek town where Teresa returns is described as just an ordinary place. Cafés, beaches, conversations, gossip. But through her encounters there like Petros, Niko with his ordinary married life, Xanthe with her café, Teresa pieces together what mourning feels like, what moving forward feels like.
There will be readers who don’t have the patience for this. They’ll want to know what’s at stake, what’s driving the story forward. But this is not a thriller. It’s not even really a drama. It’s closer to what happens when you sit with a friend over coffee and the conversation wanders. At first it feels aimless, and then an hour later you realise you’ve been talking about the most important things in your life without ever announcing it.
The novel is full of little failures. The diary entries are fragmentary. Even the title, One Boat, is elusive. It points to the boat in the bay, perfectly placed, balancing the scene. But it also gestures toward the individual life, drifting, alone but not alone, shaped by the sea of others. Consider this- “A boat chugged out of the harbour and we watched it until it halted in the heart of the bay, in a position that might have been determined by its effect on the composition of the scene, so beautifully did it balance the composition.” Is it a metaphor for existence? Probably. Is it too simple? Possibly.
What struck me most while reading was how emotional the book became by its end, despite its cool, observational style. Petros’s acceptance of memory as “gifts” hit me harder than I expected. Teresa’s repeated returns to the loss of the mother, the father, the marriage didn’t feel like melodrama. They accumulate until you realise the book has been building a philosophy of grief all along: about how to live with it as part of the fabric of time.
It’s tempting to compare this novel to others on the Booker longlist that are more structurally ambitious or politically direct. One Boat doesn’t experiment with language in flamboyant ways. It asks what kind of knowledge memory can give us. It asks what happens when you realise that asking further questions won’t help. And it suggests that the beauty of life might not be in explanation but in wondering.
The novel can be frustrating too. The drifting timelines sometimes blur into confusion. The diary entries, especially the dream fragments, can ride the risk of self-indulgence.
If literature is, as I suggested earlier, our modern form of philosophy, then Buckley has quite succeeded in writing a sort of lived philosophy. Reading it, I felt what Teresa feels when she looks out at the sea. That something ordinary can be, for a moment, extraordinary, for it makes you stop, look, and wonder.
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
