A Grave for Fish: The Haunted Shore in Wyl Menmuir’s The Many

The fish that are caught, rarely enough, in an empty and silent sea in Wyl Menmuir’s short novel The Many (2016), are either diseased—‘burned […] with white lesions down the side of each body […] black skin dull and flaked away in patches’—or ghostly—colourless, translucent, ‘the outlines of organs visible, shadows in the pale flesh’. The uncanny atmosphere of The Many is multilayered, evoked by an elusive ecological menace and an even less tangible sense of entrapment and doom. The run down state of the isolated fishing village where the novel is set appears to be caused by an environmental disaster, ‘a profusion of biological agents and contaminants’ in the sea, but the actual cause is never explained. The novel hovers between the ecocritical depiction of a polluted shore and a Gothic sense of claustrophobia and oppression, expressed through the protagonists’ dreams and memories as well as embodied in an external agency that keeps the village under constant surveillance. In my paper, I explore the mutual enhancement between an ecological and a psychological Gothic, which Menmuir effects by shifts in focalisation, chronological breaks and the engagement with space. The littoral setting plays a decisive role in the process of disorientation which affects the characters as well as the readers. In a constantly shifting and treacherous environment, sensory perception and memory appear more and more unreliable, until finally the boundaries of personal identity are as much eroded as the very ground beneath the villagers’ feet.