Thomas Flett is a rider to the sea. With a difference. He does not set off on a fishing boat to brave the uncompanionable fury of the Atlantic Ocean or the North Sea. He is a “shanker”, a fisher of shrimp, who takes his horse and cart out to scour the foreshore in the early morning for the sea creatures that enable him and his mother to eke out a meagre living.
Thomas is something of an anomaly – none of the shankers use horses any more, and rather than being a doughty veteran, he is a young man barely into his twenties.
Benjamin Wood’s fifth novel is an extraordinary evocation of the liminal world caught between land and sea, where Thomas plies his trade. Wood’s patient, beautifully paced accumulation of detail not only captures the particular feel of the coastal area that is Thomas’s workaday environment but proves equally adept in bringing to life the tight, ferociously unsentimental set of circumstances that define his horizon of expectation.
The sudden arrival of Edgar, a Hollywood film-maker intent on using Thomas’s knowledge of the foreshore to establish suitable filming locations, turns the young shanker’s world upside down.
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As in much of Wood’s writing to date, his use of language in this latest novel is compelling in its lyrical discipline
Wood is especially skilful in charting Thomas’s wary, tentative reaction to this apparent shift in his family fortunes. A near-death experience in coastal fog while out scouting for locations with Edgar brings Thomas’s relationship with the father he never knew (who was killed during the second World War) into sharp relief.
Out of the tension of remembering comes an embrace of Thomas’s creative potential as a musician and songwriter. Wood keeps telling to a minimum. Showing is everything. Seascraper studiously avoids the all-too-conventional trope of hopes dashed or illusions lost.
The suggestive open-endedness of the tale and the immensely sensitive handling of Thomas’s growing affections for his local sweetheart, Joan Wyeth, leave room for hope, for endings that are not always held hostage to the fatality of material circumstance.
As in much of Wood’s writing to date, his use of language in this latest novel is compelling in its lyrical discipline – exact, never ostentatious. Seascraper can only add to his reputation as one of Britain’s most engaging contemporary novelists.
