I’d not read anything by Benjamin Wood when Seascraper was pitched to me. It’s his fourth book but this is his first novella, beautifully packaged with a cover that fits it well. Set sometime in the 1950s, it takes place over a single day which sees Thomas Flett lifted out of his hardscrabble life for a few brief hours.
There’s a low-lying hump of cloud whose edges are still visible against the purpling darkness, crawling eastwards, snuffing out the moon.
Thomas is almost twenty, his body already showing signs of ageing thanks to his work as a shankar. He lives with his mother in a dilapidated shack he has neither the time nor inclination to repair. Thomas took over the shrimp fishing business from his grandfather, aged sixteen, left to support both himself and his mother with little time left for the music he loves. On a spring Thursday morning, he gets up well before dawn to accommodate the tides, taking his horse down to the sea, hoping for a good catch but pollution has been taking its toll. Once the day’s shrimp has been sold, he heads home to find his mother with an American man who has the oddest proposition for him. Edgar is a movie director, intent on filming a novel for which Thomas’s stretch of beach offers the perfect location. He needs Thomas’s help negotiating the treacherous waters along a coastline peppered with sinkholes and offers a princely sum for doing so. Their recce of the beach that night ends with an epiphany for Thomas.
He gets the sense that something’s turning in his fortunes. All those dreary shifts at sea, gone unrewarded. All his ma’s relentless praying before bedtime. Well, at last a table scrap of luck’s been thrown to them to gnaw the meat off.
Wood’s descriptions of the bleak landscape and the difficulties Thomas endures are vividly cinematic and arresting. He and his mother lead a hand-to-mouth life. She’s been shunned for the affair she had with her history teacher which left her pregnant at fifteen. His life has been constrained by poverty and family obligation with little hope of change but he dreams of becoming a musician and catching the eye of his best friend’s sister. The arrival of Edgar with his tales of Hollywood and glamour are met with scepticism by Thomas overcome by the hope of a friendship and a future. Things may not quite turn out the way he expected but there’s hope for Thomas at the end of this atmospheric, dreamlike novella.
I’ve since read Wood’s The Young Accomplice on my Yorkshire break and it couldn’t be more different. It’s left me keen to explore more of his work.
Viking: London 9780241741344 176 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)
