Tower and Town, February 2019

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A Good Read For Mid-Winter

I'm writing this about a month before you're likely to read it, but whatever the weather might be doing, I'm fairly confident that we'll still all be deep in that mid-winter wanting-to-hunker-down-and-hibernate mode. Just the right frame of mind in fact for a long, slow-flowing novel like Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield.

The story begins one winter night, at some unspecified time in the early to mid nineteenth century, in an inn on the Thames. Out of the wet darkness staggers an injured man, carrying a dead – drowned - child. The man collapses, and is tended to, the girl's body is laid out in a store room. And then the child comes back to life, fragile but uninjured, and mute. Who is the man, what has happened? Who is the child, and to which, if any, of the people who claim her, does she belong?

A return from the dead can never be straightforward. The lines between the supernatural, local superstitions, and science are untangled as assorted mysteries, heartbreaks and family secrets gradually unwind and the child's identity is revealed. 

In reading, as in life, it's good to be open to something different. I say this, because in many ways this is absolutely not a novel I thought I'd enjoy. It's a meandering book, with a large cast of characters; it's not quite historical fiction and not just a mystery. There's a faint suggestion of magical realism (if that's not your thing - and I'm with you - don't be afraid, it's just a hint).

The dense narrative and range of characters is almost Dickensian, but again, if you share my aversion to Our Greatest Novelist, don't worry. It's more like what Dickens could be if he just stopped banging his readers on the head to make his point. The writing is stylish without being overblown, evocative without becoming a pastiche of the Victorian novel, and as much as anything, this is a story about storytelling. If you fancy immersing yourself (see what I did there?) in something engrossing, then I recommend that you allow yourself to slip gently into the narrative and go with the flow.

Just enough room to highlight two books I thoroughly enjoyed last year, now out in paperback – Old Baggage by Lissa Evans, a novel about what happens when you've achieved your goals; and Sarah Langford, a practising barrister, takes us through a series of (anonymised) cases, demonstrating the workings, successes and failings of the legal system in In Your Defence. 

Debbie Guest