This debut novel by scriptwriter and editor Jeremy Page is a simple enough story of one Norfolk family’s toil and trouble over three generations, yet it draws on such a vivid sense of the uncanny that it ends up being a remarkably haunting read. Its heady evocation of its littoral East Anglian setting – displaying an appreciation for the rural we rarely find in contemporary English writing, which tends to be either urban or suburban – creates an atmosphere you can taste on the tongue, and an ineluctable momentum which carries the reader off despite the leisurely pace at which the narratiave unspools, and the way it’s hedged about with the narrator’s doubts
and evasions.
It begins with a wartime encounter between Goose, a young woman who sees the future in clouds but prefers to inhabit the spookily indeterminate marshlands where water and earth intersect, and Hans, a downed German pilot, at home only in flight, who hides out in her cottage long enough to see a daughter born, then skedaddles in a makeshift boat. His voyage is the first of many boat-trips which give the story its framework, and the symbolic load he carries – of foreignness, absense and escape – is typical in a book which inscribes everything in the landscape with hieroglyphs of meaning.
Goose and Hans’ grandson, Pip, is the narrator struggling to understand his parents’ and grandparents’ history. Page is not the first writer to realise that a strange child makes a good filter for a strange story, but he handles Pip’s oddness – he is unable to speak for most of the book – deftly, and steers him firmly towards his crucial revelations. The literal and metaphorical fireworks he ignites on his quest (his uncle Kipper is a firework-maker by trade, and is one of several explosive character in the family) cast a sickly light on everything that’s precious to Pip, including his newfound voice and his faltering relationship with Elsie, the love of his life.
Most of all, though, Page is concerning with storytelling and the slipperiness of truth – the way it nestles treacherously in vast marshes of falsehood, and brings madness to anyone who tries to follow it there. There’s horror in the realisation that clean, simple answers are impossible, and this quiet, meticulous book nails it perfectly.
