Surf roaring over the black streak of a lost fishing net, the protracted struggle to retrieve it from the smothering sea, jagged cliffs and the fight to sustain a bare existence—so begins 1934’s Man of Aran, which follows the subsistence struggles of a coastal Irish community. It wasn’t the first documentary, but it was made by the first documentarian, Robert Flaherty, whose film Nanook of the North (1922) is widely considered to have inaugurated the genre despite his habit of fabricating characters and plotlines to romanticize “primitive” cultures.

Flaherty explained that his very mission as a filmmaker was “to show the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible.” It was also what audiences wanted to see: Nanook was a global hit. Its legacy in the Canadian Arctic—where Flaherty slept with at least one of the film’s Inuk stars and then abandoned their son—was more complex, but by then, he had moved on. After a documentary set on a Samoan island flopped, Flaherty decided to try his luck on Ireland’s wind-scoured outskirts. There, he and his crew spent two years following unrelated islanders chosen to portray “a man of Aran,” “his wife,” and “their son” as they clamber over house-sized boulders to scavenge seaweed, teeter on the edge of cliffs with a fishing line, and subdue a thrashing shark from a ramshackle rowboat. Man of Aran won praise abroad but was criticized even at the time for its lack of attention to social context; later commentators exposed much of it as fraudulent. Still, Flaherty’s participants were mysteriously committed to the film. “He won me and won my soul out of me as well,” said Pat Mullen, who interpreted for his Irish-speaking neighbors.

No one filmed what happened behind Flaherty’s camera, but Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall provides a fictionalized guess. It’s not an exact parallel—O’Connor’s island community is Welsh, not Irish, and the visitors who have washed up on its shores to chronicle the village are working on an ethnographic book—but there are deliberate echoes. Our teenage narrator, Manod, is the local assistant for the two researchers, Joan and Edward, who—like Flaherty—turn to fabricated details and staged scenes to simulate the quaint, backward society of their fantasies. The book has to be perfect, Joan insists defensively; it has to “capture a sense of the island.” When Manod responds, “The island that’s in your head. I don’t think it exists,” Joan tells her to go home.

Manod is already home, of course, but that’s not a fact she embraces. Even after she begins to realize what Joan and Edward are up to, they remain far more alluring to her than the island, which Manod has never considered either interesting or beautiful. She introduces the researchers to her neighbors, fastidiously translates from the Welsh, covers for their mistakes. Their stated goal: to “preserve a sense of true Britishness.”

But the three-mile island is already on the margins of Great Britain—Joan and Edward are the first English people Manod has ever met—and the islanders, preoccupied with survival, have little sense of themselves as part of a larger empire. It’s the eve of the Second World War, and the islanders’ bruising way of life is only getting harder as young people flee to the mainland, leaving those who remain to their increasingly anachronistic lifestyle: shipwrecks and early widowhood, food scarcity, paltry education, only the rudiments of medical care. Even the weather is worsening: The previous year, the water was laden for months with the bodies of birds that had dived too hard and snapped their necks on an unexpectedly high sea.

The threat of mandatory evacuation hovers over the story, and other nearby islands have already emptied out, in response to depopulation and storms rather than bombs. The distinction between shore and sea is getting fuzzier every year. Although the narration eventually slips into the first-person singular as it follows Manod more closely, the book begins with and returns to an omniscient “we,” the voice of the island as a collective, comparing the water to the land until any distinction is lost. The sea, in one scene, is like a pot of boiling sheep heads; the water-rippled pages of a classmate’s mother’s romance novels resemble waves. Surf splatters the windows of Manod’s family’s cottage as its inhabitants sleep, and the clams are coming closer and closer to its threshold.

When the novel’s titular whale washes into the shallows “like a cat slinking under a door,” the list of all those who do not notice includes the keepers of the lighthouse, the night fishermen, the farmers moving livestock, and the sheep themselves. If Flaherty and his compatriots objectified people they saw as “primitive,” O’Connor intervenes by imbuing both the islanders and their island with subjecthood. In Whale Fall, the landscape and its people speak together, with Manod as their chosen and compromised avatar; she wants, more than anything, to leave them behind.

In her 2014 memoir H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald spent the months after her father’s death stalking the hills around Oxford with a young goshawk on her fist. Her feelings about those hills were complicated. “Loving landscapes like this,” she wrote, “involves a kind of history that concerns itself with purity.” Indeed, England’s chalk downlands have long been seeded with nationalist potential. “Did we condescend to worship her, here we should erect our national shrine,” wrote E.M. Forster in 1907.

Rejecting modernity in the wake of the Great War, a contingent of writers undertook that deification with gusto, calling on “a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage,” as Macdonald put it. They went on “reasonable walks” (12 to 30 miles), fantasized about prehistoric relics, dreaded the return to a world of “quarries,” “obscene shale,” “oil-traders.” For one F.J. Harvey Darton, the hills brought out reactionary as well as environmentalist tendencies: They were “part of a world in which, to a Radical, Conservatism may well appear the creed of Utopia.”