The sky is lying on the loch, filling the trees, heavy in the spaces between the pine needles, settling between blades of grass and mottling the pebbles on the beach. Although there’s no distance between cloud and land, nowhere for rain to fall, it is raining...[loc. 16]
Summerwater is told in twelve chapters, each from a different viewpoint. The chapters are interleaved with short passages about the natural world: the foxes in their den, ants in an anthill, the waters of the loch ...
'Told' may not be the right word. While there is a plot here, it isn't foregrounded. (This may be an elaborate way of my saying that I'm still not sure what actually happens.) Rather, it's a collection of experiences. Each of the narrators is on holiday, during a period of torrential rain, in one of the log cabins beside a Scottish loch. Each of them -- Justine who runs, Alex who risks drowning, Izzie who's afraid of the dark, Josh who can't wait to return to Barra -- has a unique voice, and they all share an exasperation (for some it's something stronger, contempt or loathing) for the people around them. Each feels trapped and finds a way of escape. And each is affected by the loud music that's played every night by a group of Ukrainians. Even the foxes and the ants are affected. But they don't verbalise their feelings about it.
There is also a Brexit element: one character mentally berates those who voted Leave: "how could the English be so stupid … how could they could not see the ring of yellow stars on every new road and hospital and upgraded railway and city centre regeneration of the last thirty years?" while another quizzes a Ukrainian child: "You’re supposed to have left, you know, people like you, did you not get the message?" Are these extremes, or just further examples of the judgmental, negative views of each narrator to pretty much every one of their fellow humans? Either way, I found myself uncomfortably identifying my own judgmental tics, and exasperated by (or contemptuous of, or full of loathing for) each character.
At least some of them appreciate the natural, if sodden, world around them.
The writing is beautiful and evocative, but I came away feeling that I'd missed something: and that 'something' eluded me again on rereading. Enough of a story is told to make it plain that people interact in complex and changing ways -- that when disaster threatens, people can be decent. But there's another story here, the story of Violetta, and I would have liked that to be more definite.
Thanks to Netgalley for a free review copy in exchange for this honest review.
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