Irish Landscape in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond

Claire-Louise Bennett is an author of English origin, who is now settled in Ireland. Her debut short story collection, Pond (2015), may be seen as a fictional representation of her relocation and early settlement. Having quit academia and theatre, the narrator redirects her attention from people to herself and the world around her. This is not, however, done straightforwardly as readers’ knowledge of the woman is limited while narration turns out fragmented and frequently incoherent. In this paper, I suggest that elaborate landscape and setting descriptions may help to unravel the narrator’s non-obvious identity. Hence, I focus on the representations of landscape in Pond and discuss their connection to narration. I consider shifts in scale and the narrator’s distance from fellow villagers as her strategies to define her place in the new country. I read her attempts to establish a blissful connection with her surroundings, at times distorted by anxiety, as a negotiation between her past and present self. Finally, the moments when Bennett resorts to abstraction are examined as hints at the narrator’s deeper insight. The construction of narration in Pond, with its relation to the setting, prompts investigation as Bennett will resort to a female, transforming narrator also in her later works.