You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.
As unexpected as his previous four books – which range from a campus intrigue (The Bellwether Revivals) to a sensitive study of a Glaswegian painter (The Ecliptic) – Seascraper follows the daily trials of Tom Flett, a “shanker” who scrapes the sand for its yield at low tide with his trusty horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is simultaneously boring and dangerous. Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it’s this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers.
Apprenticed by his pop at 14 (“every other Flett had been a shrimper, going back to his great-grandpa”), Tom nevertheless longs for a life less circumscribed. He yearns to perform folksongs in the local pubs and court local girl Joan, but lacks the courage for both. An avid reader, he has swallowed “half a library” at a young age, yet finds himself tied to a job that gives him little fulfilment. Meanwhile, his widowed mother entertains gentleman suitors in the front room, perching on the sofa in her best clothes.
When the latest suitor turns out to be a slick American film director named Edgar Acheson, Tom sees his chance of escape. Edgar is scouting locations for a movie adaptation and immediately looks to recruit Tom as his local guide, “a guy who knows the beach, the tides”. Tom agrees at once, though acutely aware of his antisocial stink of “pervasive sweat and shrimp rot, fish guts, crab flesh, seaweed, dander, forage, gull shit, horse dung”. The two form a fast friendship, with Tom warning his exuberant employer of the treacherous sinkholes that open up on the beach, deep enough to swallow a horse and drag you down after it. It’s this mortal danger that ramps up the tension for the book’s long and surreal central section where Tom and Edgar set out to recce the beach at night.
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What makes Wood’s writing such a pleasure is his attentiveness to the prosaic details of everyday life. Whether it’s harnessing a horse, cooking a fry-up or tuning a guitar, he transforms the quotidian into the poetic, making the exactitude of each task sing on the page. The book is full of visceral and evocative descriptions of the natural world, “the festering scent of bladderwrack … a strange, spasmodic crunch each time the wheels pass over razor shells and gnarls of driftwood … undulating sand that gives beneath the wheels as readily as butter”. He’s equally adept at creating warm and believable characters whose deep humanity makes you want to spend time in their company.
Inevitably, Edgar isn’t all he purports to be, leading Tom back to his first love, music, as he composes a ballad to woo Joan. This precipitates an epiphany about the power of art: “A song, though – well, a song belongs to someone. To whoever dreamed it up.” In this sense, he achieves his dreams without turning his back on tradition, and much of the book is concerned with the tension between long-established ways of living and the insistent klaxon of modernity, embodied by Edgar, along with new technologies and their attendant ills. Early on, Tom notes that there is “all sorts in the water now that wasn’t there when he was just a lad. Strange chemicals and pesticides and sewage.” He also observes that “there’s more profit to be made using motor rigs and shrimping further down the coast”.
While some of the dialogue veers close to folksy, and Edgar is straight from central casting, there’s a clarity of observation and lack of sentimentality that raises the book from a simple tale of unfulfilled lives and nostalgia for a vanished past. The short form feels Conradian, lending a welcome density and brevity – apt for a protagonist grappling with physical adversity and inner turmoil. Seascraper sees Wood join the ranks of adventurous mid-career British novelists such as Barney Norris and Ben Myers; all three are treading a singular path with unfashionable yet heartfelt accounts of lives that long for a wider horizon.