I've had to delve a long way back in my reading journal to find out when I read Diane Setterfield's first novel The Thirteenth Tale. August 2006, the scribbles here would have been a mere five months in existence and now look...we're heading for teenage-dom and our thirteenth year this March. I always enjoy a look back over books read, The Thirteenth Tale preceded by The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moburg, The Girl From the Chartreuse by Pierre Peju and The Barracks by John McGahern, and followed by Lying Awake by Mark Salzman, The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth. I can see no rhyme nor reason to the ordering of these things either, no common and recurring theme, no method. I was obviously just enjoying a summer of reading whilst still working at the coalface. It would be another three years before I left the NHS and caseload health visiting for four years as an online health visitor for Netmums, and then 'retirement' and looking after the Tinker and life since.
Goodness, where does the time go.
A proof copy of Once Upon a River arrived a few months ago and, noting that the story began on the winter solstice, I had set it aside for an early Christmas read ...
'It was solstice night. the longest night of the year. For weeks the days had been shrinking gradually, then precipitously, so that it was now dark by mid-afternoon. As is well known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in the waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic...'
I think it has almost become my most favourite time of the year, especially now that we are home and able to really take notice of the landscape around us and the Tamar nearby. So I was ready for some enchantment...
'And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between the worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, he past and the present touch and overlap...'
Oh yes, I was certainly ready for this. Walking up to the woods and watching the winter sun through the trees, knowing that the earth would be turning and we would be on our way back into the light, I settled down with Once Upon a River and not an ounce of disappointment or disenchantment did I feel from beginning to end.
It is 1887 and the arrival of a stranger, photographer Henry Daunt, carrying a child in his arms, to all intents a dead child, has the locals at The Swan Inn on the upper reaches of the Thames all of a dither.
The sights, smells and sounds of the river pervade the story from the off. It is winter-damp, dark and dank, murky and powerful, controlling and all-consuming and laden with potential for a story to unfurl and flow...
'A river no more begins at its source than a story begins at its first page...'
Let there be no greater warning than this, that I was about to embark on a journey with this story as it ebbed and flowed and meandered off along tributaries before finding its way back to its source. It is an analogy that weaves it way throughout the book as Diane Setterfield brings the fundamentals of story-telling into the light to be examined.
How a story begins...
It's effect on those first witnesses...
The urgent and compelling need to tell others...
How far will it stray from its origins in that telling...
How far will it travel...
And how exactly did a story travel back in the day. I think we might almost have forgotten, though I am reminded whenever I go to a village gathering.
The river metaphors abound and it is nigh on impossible to describe the book and its plot without falling into river-speak about flow and under-currents and merging waters in connection with story-telling, and all quietly juxtaposed with the early years of photography about to usher in new ways of telling.
Meanwhile, when local nurse-midwife Rita Sunday, called to The Swan to minister to the new arrivals, discovers that the mysterious child thought dead is actually alive, it's clear to all present that 'something is about to happen' and plenty does, none of which I am going to go into in any detail but here's one page from several in my journal which I jot down as I read...
'There will be much thwarting of hopes and desires, and a story which refuses to remain within the confines of its banks, frequently over-flowing and finding new directions, leaving sediment and clues and detritus in its wake, refusing to be tidy...'
and I loved it all.
'Surrender to the current, go with the flow and escape into this magical, mysterious, watery world.'
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