Broken Harbour

Throughout Broken Harbour, French uses modern social and financial pressures to illustrate how humans resort to their more animal natures when under duress. The social context of the 2008 recession in Ireland is presented in the narrative as crucial to Pat and Jenny’s devolving mental states. Without the move to Brianstown, the loss of Pat’s job, his obsession with the animal, and Jenny’s isolation, their story may have gone differently. While the novel presents this argument, it also uses Scorcher’s first-person point of view to compare the current social decline with his memories of the past.

Through Scorcher’s point of view, French examines how the abandonment of social niceties and cultural norms opens the doors for more instinctive, reactionary, and animalistic behavior. In his estimation, the transition from human to animal is connected to historical and cultural context, and French juxtaposes the pressures faced by the Spains during the 2008 recession in Ireland against Scorcher’s memory of a better time. In an important passage right after he and Richie discover Conor’s lair, and with it, the possibility that the Spains were the targets of a random criminal, Scorcher meditates on the difference between the Ireland of his childhood and the present: