MixedIrish Independent (IRE)Though they are given equal air time, it’s the 17th-century voyage that compels. The world is strange, Dutch, maritime, far-flung, exotic ... The most gripping and vibrant descriptions are reserved for the 17th-century chapters, where the prose is packed and lyrical ... The Batavia is simply too epic, too fascinating and appalling, to allow room for another lesser tale, and the colourful characters of island life did not excite this reader ... The Night Ship is a work of prolific imagination, ambition and faith to history and its victims. My own qualm was with the excess of the work.
Sara Baume
MixedThe Irish Independent (IRE)... intense and labyrinthine ... [Baume\'s] fourth book and with it she digs a hole ever deeper into the unknown, the mystical, sinister, curious and unpopular, lacing the scenes with her signature absurdist humour ... Baume writes with beauty and precision about the natural world, particularly animals, but extracts no joy. Here is a writer engaging with our environment without celebrating it; Seven Steeples is more a dirge than a hymn to our planet ... was written before the lockdowns of our pandemic but it dramatises exactly that feeling of banishment; though, unlike most of us, Bell and Sigh choose their fate ... Throughout the wilfully boring scenes of this anti-entertainment, I kept waiting for something to happen, like a kiss, a fight or a strange visit. When it did not, I was disappointed. The total effacement of character becomes hard to stomach and I felt, by the end of 250 pages, that the text certainly could have withstood a little love between its lonely stick-person souls ... What happens to Bell and Sigh is a nightmare of monogamy, a dismal transubstantiation of boy and girl and dogs into one hybrid being. Becoming one is the ultimate romantic project and here it is achieved yet in a perverse, almost terrifying example ... makes for a masterpiece you won’t enjoy — a brave and challenging new experiment from an author who has never aimed to please or entertain. It is no page-turner, and its conclusion may haunt those inclined to millenarianism or everyday despair. Happy reading.
