Review: Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond mad, intimate look at a life unravelling

"I only wish you could just spend five minutes beneath my skin and feel what it's like. Feel the savage swarming magic I feel." A woman abandons her doctoral thesis and the city for a reclusive existence by a rural pond – those are the broad strokes of Claire-Louise Bennett's debut novel, but what this book is really about is that "savage swarming magic." "Fecund" is the word that kept popping to mind – fecund the way a pond is fecund, teeming with life, a riotous cycle of growth and decay. A pond is a little bit mad. So's this narrator. She's come undone – there are hints of a breakup, pre-existing skittishness, reliance on drink – and she continues to unravel in the Irish coastal countryside, though here it seems an almost productive undoing. Then there's that appeal: "feel what I feel." Pond's narrative style allows no distance between reader and protagonist-narrator: We know this madness intimately. A wild, rewardingly ecstatic ride.