Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings – processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts. [loc. 1829]
Shaw is fiftysomething, emerging from an indeterminate crisis, washing up at a lodging house by the Thames. He encounters an odd fellow, Tim, in a graveyard, and ends up working for him -- though the work makes no sense, involving deliveries to empty premises and, later, visits to a medium named Annie. Tim runs a blog called 'The Water House' and is the author of the nigh-unreadable The Journeys of our Genes. On the wall of his houseboat office is a map of the world with land and oceans inverted.
Shaw has a laid-back sort of affair with a woman named Victoria, a 'high-functioning romantic' who sees things rather more clearly than does Shaw: after a while she heads to Shropshire, to a market town on the Severn gorge and the house she has inherited from her dead mother. There, she befriends (or at least encounters) a waitress named Pearl and her father Chris: but she slowly begins to realise that in this small-town setting she is out of her depth.
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again overflows with watery similes and metaphors, references to the sea and to rivers. (For example, Victoria's mother left a plethora of random possessions with oceanic echoes: 'nacre-buttoned denim shirts, an air freshener that claimed to smell of a coastal walk'.) Houses are damp; rivers run everywhere; there are stories, some more credible than others, of green children appearing in drains and toilet bowls. Coincidence that the road from Victoria's house to the river is named Woolpit Road? I do not think anythink in this novel is coincidence.
This is a difficult book to review (though see below for more intelligent commentaries) because, on the surface, very little happens. Victoria sees a woman walk down into a shallow pool as though descending a staircase into the London Underground. Shaw, trying to piece together some sense of himself and his family, visits his mother, who's suffering dementia and calls him by various names he denies: the one that seems to stick is Lee. Hat-tip to Patrick O'Brian and the 'impervious horror of a lee[ward] shore'? Or coincidence? But see above regarding coincidences.
Harrison's prose is as sharp and astonishing as ever. There are unfamiliar terms (dérive, induviae, goaf, jitty ...) and unusual similitudes ("her cushions and covers, though they remained dull and even a little grubby-looking, took on the pure painterly values and eerie depth of the objects on a Virago book cover in 1982" [loc. 1434] -- I love the specificity of that). I found it all too easy to be distracted from the plot, or the scenario, by the sensory richness with which it was conveyed. But there is a plot, though it's meandering and discursive and inconclusive. Or perhaps that description applies to Shaw and Victoria, who see but do not understand what they are seeing.
There is a lot packed into this short novel: Brexit, Thatcher, climate change, genetics, Charles Kingsley, civil wars, the inland cities ... I am looking forward to rereading: but not yet.
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