The Whale Tattoo

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Of greater concern is the river water which flows near where Joe is staying which Joe is repeatedly drawn to—water which talks to Joe, telling echoing, worrisome, and dire comments made by the whale.

he felt like a real three-dimensional person, and his struggles, with his sexuality and together with the grief, following the loss of his mother in the flood felt very real.

He developed The Whale Tattoo at Arvon Fiction: Work in Progress retreat,after winning a place on the 2018 Arts Council England TLC Free Read Scheme. The Whale Tattoo' is a book that takes off at a breakneck pace and delves deep into the specifics of how we hurt and affect those that we love most, as well as the scars left behind by love.

What had really appealed to me when I first heard about the book was that it was offering a spread in time and would move forward thirty years to London at the time of AIDS. I appreciate literary fiction, and sometimes I feel that maybe I'm not smart enough to fully understand it, but this inclusion and shift went completely over my head and out the window. It’s disturbing, honest and seeps into the psyche of the reader in the same way water pervades the narrative. And when one day, standing like an idiot staring through the glass that’s covered in clouds galloping across the sky behind, you’ll get an idea.Loss, grief, jealousy, love and lust are all full-bodied entities battling over space on every page, but the mundanity that houses them leaves little room for sentimentality. Two-hundred and twenty-nine pages of words that fell out of your head are bound inside a pleasing cover depicting a lad who’s a little bit like you. The dialogue, itself, didn't feature any name variations between the ones it involved, except at the end of the conversation, where we get to know who gets the final say. Complex, fraught and violent, The Whale Tattoo reads like an early Tracy Lett’s play – a steaming mix of blue-collar rage and menace. They are all tethered to each other in one way or another and the messy revelations throughout the story propel the narrative deeper and deeper into a cesspool of allegiance, grief and vengeance.