Jones provides little to the reader but equivocal statements that we cling to, as if they give us something, which we know they don't. Cove is Beckettian in prose and virtue: removing as much as possible, leaving out even the necessities, and raising questions the reader struggles to grasp ... Cove is the latest and most accomplished of Jones's works. It once again proves Jones's formidable talent. The book is confusing and demanding and damning and everything and anything and nothing. Above all else, however, Cove is beautiful, all too beautiful.
The Dig is to my mind a richer book than Cove, because it contains multitudes and sets unexpected forces in messy opposition. But Cove, Jones’s fifth novel, is both taut and impressively polymorphous ... The technical complexity of the writing is sometimes too visible; there are shifts of tense, for example, that might baffle Henry Green. But mostly the risks pay off. An elliptical frame narrative throws us out towards another, untold, story. The shape of the book depends on unforced parallels between one untranslatable sign and another ... If the modulation between 'I' and 'you' looks tricksy on the page at first, it soon feels true to the experience of tiredness, disorientation and love. It is a distinction of this brief, charged novel that if you ask at any moment 'who is speaking' it is best not to expect a final answer.
Jones’ terse lyricism, together with his repetition of resonant images and motifs, encourage the reader to fill in the gaps ... Jones strips the story down to its elemental core and much of it reads like a prose poem. His vivid descriptions allow us to feel the man’s physical discomfort and flagging spirit ... Cove is a slighter work than Jones’ previous novel, The Dig, but explores similar themes. Just as The Dig was about the rhythms of rural life, Cove is about the dangerous, unknowable rhythms of the sea. Both are about devastation — one emotional, the other physical — and both examine love, loss, memory and the will to live. Cove is a haunting meditation on trauma and human fragility.
Cynan Jones’s books tend to rest on the intersection of the interior struggles of his characters and the exterior challenges the elements present ... short as it [Cove] may be, it provides a bit of rigor as it slips between linearity and non-linearity; moreover, it’s written in fragmented sections that often read a bit more like prose poetry than do Jones’s other books. As we’ve come to expect from Jones, the story begins in a mystery, a narrative fugue state, where Jones keeps the characters and the reader just inches away from the pieces they need to find purchase in a world that is constantly presenting them with foul and slippery moments of chance. If only the characters could locate themselves in the narrative, they could quite easily step away, find solutions, but this is not the luxury life affords them, and thus we must ride along with them as they assemble their reality. It sounds simple, indeed, but Jones always manages to keep the mystery fresh. After all, any lesson worth learning, is worth learning the hard way, and in Jones’s universe, this seems to be the only way ... The thing I enjoyed most about this book was Jones’ ability to carry sound through his lines. Because of the somewhat fragmented structure of the prose, this sonic thread really helps move the book along ... the word choice adds texture and music.
In what is more an exercise in empathy than a full-throated novel, Jones (Everything I Found on the Beach, 2016) sets the reader adrift with an unnamed narrator who has just been struck by lightning while fishing in a kayak far from shore ... Jones echoes other survival narratives by keeping his narrator’s voice internal, but he creates a feeling of desperate solitude with wonderfully sparse language. Lovers of poetry and experimental prose will marvel at this impressionistic lament.
At times the lyricism hurts comprehension with mixed metaphors and awkward similes, but the quick, sharp sentences and use of white space heighten narrative tension. As the protagonist fights the urge to drift away, collides with wildlife, and loses all sense of time, Jones’s narrative becomes increasingly momentous. This is a gripping story with a unique style that reflects the remarkable limits of the human spirit.
Jones is a highly talented writer about nature, but here he strives to connect two conflicting rhetorical modes—straightforward survival tale and elegiac riff on loss and mortality—into one overly confining space. Focusing so much on his hero getting on with the simple business of staying alive gives his other themes short shrift. It’d be cruel to wish Jones punished his castaway further, but his tale cries out for a broader canvas.
