#Review - The Draw of the Sea by Wyl Menmuir

The Draw of the Sea
Wyl Menmuir
Quarto, 5 July 2022
Available as: HB, 304pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780711273962

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Draw of the Sea to consider for review.

They that go down to the sea in ships, 

that do business in great waters;

These see the works of the Lord, 

and his wonders in the deep.

(Psalm 107, 23-24)

When I was a child, the family would sometimes go to the seaside (New Brighton) on a winter's day and sit in the car watching the waves break on the beach. This sounds weird, but I gather it's actually quite a common thing to do.

Menmuir's book - part memoir, part travelogue, all salty and haunting - explores that same instinct, although it celebrates rather closer engagement with the water than I've ever had - which is one of the things that makes The Draw of the Sea such an enthralling read.

Here you'll meet beachcombers ('wreckers'), surfers, sailors, fishermen, conservationists, artists and everyone in between. Based in Cornwall, Menmuir has many opportunities to explore the seashore and he weaves the results together into a bewitching, hypnotic and all-absorbing hymn to the waves, the shifting pebbles, the animals and plants that make their homes in the water. It also celebrates the people who go down to the sea and do business in great - or even small - waters.

It isn't a romanticised or idyllic account. Menmuir makes clear the challenges of the life: for example, physical dangers and hardships (in past times, those wreckers depended on what they could scrounge from the shore - and no, they didn't lure ships onto the rocks). He also draws attention to the damage being done to wildlife and ecosystems by modernity in general or, sometimes, simply by foolish individuals; to the unimaginable quantities of plastics polluting the seas, the oil spills, overfishing and sheer thoughtlessness of humanity. It's grim reading in places, but we do also meet people who are trying to make a difference - and the author admits that there can be a sort of syncronicitous beauty in the bizarre findings from beaches, even in all that plastic.

The chapters are short, focussing on the different ways the sea can be approached, understood or enjoyed and woven into it are Menmuir's own memories, beginning with a life far from the shore and then describing all the facets of his relationship with it now - including resorting there for healing and calm, surely one of the most common reasons for walking the beach or living near the sea. Even that, though, has its drawbacks. We are shown the effect on coastal communities of second-home ownership and overtourism, the impact on humans of other humans being strangely similar to that of humans on the wildlife.

In exploring what the sea means to us, and allowing us to hear from those who who work with it, live by it, enjoy it, struggle with it or seek to preserve it, Menmuir presents a wonderful variety of voices and of experiences. There is a great deal of wisdom here, and I loved the way that he lets these different viewpoints speak to one another, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not. The book benefits from the fact that Menmuir is part of the communities described here - this isn't a journalists's fleeting account, it's grounded (maybe I should say watered?) in his lived experience and drips with a gentle authenticity that makes it a joy to read.

The photographs and maps add to that, ranging from the intimate - beach gleanings or individuals - to the epic - seascapes and wild views. In fact the book itself is a gorgeous item, the cover a treat to the eye, the endpapers marbled, the photos atmospheric and numinous.  Definitely one to hold in one's hands and read, I think - though if you're actually going to take the book onto those Cornish beaches you might want the e-book too.

For more information about The Draw of the Sea, see the publisher's website here.

Review - A Degree of Uncertainty by Nicola K Smith

A Degree of Uncertainty
Nicola K Smith
Compass Publishing, 20 November 2019
PB, e, 334pp

I'm grateful to the author for a copy of A Degree of Uncertainty to consider for review.

A Degree of Uncertainty is a book focussed on the impact a new university is having on the small West Cornish town of Poltowan.

Jobs are being created and business generated for some of the local traders - but houses are also being snapped up for investment and letting, established firms are being replaced by new ones focussed on the students and local families being priced out of the market. Nor are the students happy as numbers increase and the friendly "boutique" experience they were promised fails to appear. Welcome to the marketised world of 21st century higher education. Estate agent Harry Manchester worries about all this, so when it becomes known that the dynamic Vice Chancellor, Dawn Goldberg, is pressing for even more expansion, he decides to take a stand. As the book opens, Harry is about to be interviewed for local TV, but he won't find it an easy ride.

I enjoyed A Degree of Uncertainty. The book surprised and pleased me by not being a semi-comic account of friction between the locals and academics (I have read that book several times) but instead focussing strongly on character and on the complexities of Poltowan and the challenges before it. So, Harry is determined to stop the expansion, for altruistic reasons, but it could be argued that he has a business interest himself. He's also in an emotionally precarious situation, having recently left his wife Sylvia for younger Jo (in no small part at Sylvia's urging). As soon becomes clear, Harry has reservations about this and doubts he can be who Jo wants him to. The emotional currents between the three are complex and they ebb and flow throughout the book, giving the story a real depth and texture.

Pitted against Harry is Goldberg, who could have been made into a 2D villain (she is a formidable opponent, and not above a few dirty tricks) but who is, instead, actually rather sympathetic. Smith makes clear Goldberg's motivations but also hints, perhaps, that she is rather out of her depth. Many of the best scenes were between Dawn and her secretary (and I think only friend) Janice.

The supporting characters are nicely drawn, too, from narrowboat dwelling student Ludo to the mysterious but alluring singer Rockstr (both of whom support Harry's campaign) and the Poltowan business owners (most of whom don't). There is plenty of grey in their motivations, plenty of room for debate about what, really, is right for Poltowan. And there are Secrets. It's a very issue-led book which shows how development and change can split communities and divide friends.

Certainly, as events gather pace, Harry finds his business suffering, his friends turning against him and his personal life coming under strain. He's an unlikely campaigner, really - he just wants to be sitting in his familiar armchair, headphones on, listening to the music of Queen - but once he takes his position, it's as if he can''t shift (perhaps there's some compensation going on for the way his domestic life has lost all its point of reference). But nor is Dawn used to being stopped: as the book's blurb say, something will have to give.

A Degree of Uncertainty is an excellent read. In this, her debut novel Smith creates characters you will care about and enough conflict to challenge them, rooted in a realistic setting and very current issues. I wanted to know more about Poltowan, its people and its future as well as about Harry, Sylvia and Dawn.

About the Author

Nicola K Smith is a freelance journalist and writer living in Cornwall, regularly contributing to a number of national newspapers and magazines. She studies English Literature at Loughborough University.

Nicola was chosen as 'most promising student' on Curtis Brown Creative's 'Starting to Write Your Novel' source and A Degree of Uncertainty was conceived under their tutelage. This is her first novel.

You can find her at:

Twitter: @NicolaKSmih
Instagram: nicolaksmith740

A Degree of Uncertainty is available from Blackwell's, from Foyles,  Waterstones or from Amazon here. For more about the book, visit Nicola's website at https://www.nicolaksmith.com 

Review - Bone China by Laura Purcell

Cover design by David Mann

Bone China
Laura Purcell
Raven Books, 19 September 2019
HB, e, 448pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance e-copy of Bone China via NetGalley.

'You would never dream of what goes on behind those walls.'

This latest of Laura Purcell's spooky historical thrillers, following from The Silent Companions and The Corset,  opens with young Hester Why squashed into a stagecoach, travelling into the West Country. Apart from the difficulties caused by six people being crammed into space for four, she suffers from an early version of a very modern problem ('a brute beast of a man is spreading his legs') and thirsts for her gin flask. It's a bit of a nightmare, which ends when another passenger is hurt and Hester is the only one who steps forward to care for him.

Which isn't the right thing for a woman travelling alone to do, in the early 19th century, and only draws attention to her, which is worse. Hester needs to keep a low profile, for reasons we will discover later - but first we see her introduced to Morvoren House, a chilly clifftop residence where she will care for a mistress in declining health, Miss Pinecroft, and a strange younger woman, Mis Pinecroft's ward, Rosewyn.

Purcell lays on the Gothic touches with delight when it comes to Morvoren House. There are mysterious sounds in the night, superstitious locals, a self-absorbed, almost speechless old woman - and Rosewyn, who spends her time tearing up Bibles to make protective charms. There are surly servants and there are secrets - those belonging to the house, and those Hester brings with her. Above all, there is the threat of the fairies, and the fear that they will carry off a young woman in the night.

The mysteries of Morvoren House can only be understood if we go back 40 years, to the arrival of Louise and her father, Ernest. The rest of the family have died of consumption: a double blow for Ernest who, as a doctor, was unable to save his own. It becomes clear that Ernest is haunted by guilt,  and he sets out to defeat the disease, performing experiments on convicts in caves deep below the house.

The mysteries of Hester Why can only, similarly, be understood if we go back several months to a house in Hanover Square, London, where young Esther Stevens takes up a new post as nurse to Lady Rose Windrop. A sympathetic character, Esther nevertheless has a whiff of the dark about her, and Sir Arthur Windrop soon has cause to ponder the series of deaths that seems to follow her... in many respects I found this section of the novel the most absorbing. There is a real tension between Esther and Lady Rose's severe mother-in-law, a real issue around Esther's (and her mother's) knowledge of midwifery and their rivalry with (masculine) medicine. Esther's somewhat brooding, obsessive nature is piqued by her closeness to Lady Rose and the reader senses many currents just below the surface. This part of the story could, in fact, almost stand as a novel in itself and I thought it was a slight shame that it needed to be truncated so that it could serve as Hester's backstory.

The same is true, though to a lesser degree, of Ernest and Louise's story. More wholeheartedly Gothic, and more of a piece with the "present day" narrative, theirs in nevertheless a tale of loss, grief and Romantic 19th century obsessiveness.

Yet I wouldn't, I think, see these stories unplanned and presented one by one. That would be like cutting up a book of Blake's poems to present each alone on the wall. Read together, the impact of these related episodes is more than their sum. We see, for example, in Esther and Louise, two capable young women who in a different age would be doctors. ('You were born to the wrong sex, my dear'). Indeed, Louise has surpassed her doctor father. We also see, ion different forms, the effects of grief and (if I'm not wrong) post-natal depression (perhaps more than one example of the latter). The metaphor of china also appears, slyly, here and there. It's something Purcell will make a great deal of in the concluding section where the rather unique collection displayed in Miss Pinecroft's sitting room seems to have a life of its own, but earlier we see Lady Rose as '...a porcelain figure... a wife was prized for smoothness and lustre'. In the selection or rejection of china as a gift Purcell encodes relationships: something given to a daughter but clearly chosen for a dead wife, or a service rejected when it offends the mystical tenets of class and taste.

And the bone china, too, has its dark secrets...

I loved this story, the darkness in each part, the hint, almost, of sulphur attaching to Hester, her combination of both a vulnerable and wronged young woman and a person who knows things, who brings her own will and her own plans with her. Miss Pinecroft was an enigma, seems ugly a slight character manipulated by others but one whom again, ultimately has inner strength and power. But almost every character here is strongly drawn and complex (apart perhaps from the clergyman, but there's a bit of humour in that!)

Strongly recommended. Get your copy now and read it when the wind gets up and the nights are dark...

For more about the book, and to order it, see the publisher's website here.

Review - The Sing of the Shore by Lucy Wood

The Sing of the Shore
Lucy Wood
4th Estate, 5 April 2018
HB, 228pp

I bought my copy of this book from Wallingford Bookshop (@wallingfordbook).

I'm a great admirer of Lucy Wood's stories. First, in Diving Belles she told short stories about women, men and the shore, with a fantastical bent. Her novel, Weathering moved inland, upriver, from the sea-salt and sand to snow and mud but still catching a hint of the wired behind everyday life.

The Sing of the Shore goes back to the coast (mainly), the Cornish coast, with tales (mainly) less magical, but perhaps sadder, chronicling lives lived awkwardly in the gaps left by absent owners and tourists, in caravans and short term lets and tents. The characters here engage with winter cold, with gales or mildew or missing parents, meeting all these different challenges with a degree of acceptance and endurance.

In Home Scar a group of children kick their heels in the off season, mooching on the shore and gently breaking in to holiday cottages. Ivor's dad seems pretty deadbeat, always trying things but giving up halfway. Ivor wants them to move away, to a more secure life. In the meantime, he, Crystal and Gull Gilbert try to enact a stolen life.

In The Dishes, Jay and Lorna and their baby have "use of" a small terraced house while Lorna works nearby at the top-secret Dishes (some kind of satellite or comms establishment, which features in several of these stories, often in connection with misplaced/ displaced families and absent parents). Alone most of his time with the not-quite-talking baby, Jay becomes obsessed with voices from the empty house next door. Something has happened which he dreads coming to light and gradually - without any weirdness, any supernaturalism - his world distorts.

Dreckly is subdivided into sections according to the fall and rise of the tide, following three friends as they comb a beach for leavings from the summer tourists. Just about making ends meet - one of them lives in her van - they are the last of their group: the others have moved on, gone away. Imbued, like many off these stories, with a sense of the seaside after hours, out of time, out of season, this is a beautiful story that really lets its protagonists breathe.

One Foot in Front of the Other takes a step back inland. It is almost folk horror story in miniature. A woman needs to "get back" (From where? To where?) but her attempts are thwarted by hedges, brambles and an ominous herd of brown cattle. With its repetition of slightly varying threats - the noise of gunfire, of an angle grinder, repeated phrases and vague geography, and constant barriers (hedges, fences) this almost felt like a story of imprisonment.

Way the Hell Out takes an old trope - the idea of the outsider family terrorised by some horror in their new rural home - and shows us another perspective, all through a conversation between Fran and Morrie, in a cafe. They almost seem to be weaving the story as they go, prompting each other. Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict is as much an undermining of the idea of a retirement idyll but told the other way round.  A husband and wife have retired to a small house above a sea cove. They have cut all their ties, left no loose ends, and are ready to spend their time not having to think. Except they haven't. Rubbish begins to wash up on the beach and Mary becomes obsessed with clearing it away. Meanwhile, we're told there is something particular they don't want to think about. A letter arrives from Vincent's ex employer and is put away, unopened. There is some problem with "our daughter" (not named). With not a word out of place, this is a perfect, intriguing gem of a story.

Salthouse opens "Winters are when people disappear". Following teenagers Gina and Evie one evening, it evokes both the in-between of an off-season resort and the in-between of young lives on the brink of changing, showing something also changing between the girls but a lot staying the same.

The Life of a Wave is anonymous, written about "you", "your father", "your mother", "your sister". Second person is tricky, personal, involving in a way neither first nor third comes near. In this story it is very effective at drawing the reader in to this story of a father and a son, set along the lifecycle of a wave from its beginning as a wind blown crease far out at sea to the final crash on the shore. That's fitting because the key thing about the father here is that he's a surfer - to the extent of forgetting his family, forgetting anything that may happen. As the story gathers pace this drives a wedge between the two and we wonder, can this end well?

Standing Water is the story of two neighbours who have long fallen out over a flooded ditch. Alive with long-fostered hatreds, it details the way the lives of the two fold intricately round each other.

A Year of Buryings is just that - vignettes of the lives lost over one year, the restless ghosts spawned form those deaths, the interrelatedness of the new occupants in the cemetery. Every story here is a perfect miniature - Wood can get as much feeling and narrative out of a single paragraph as some writers manage in a full length novel. As with Way the Hell Out there is a sense here of a participant shaping events and sometimes perplexed ("What the hell am I meant to do with that?")

Cables is another meeting with Fran and Morrie, now telling the story of a man obsessed by the undersea cables coming ashore on the beach. Convinced he can hear a hum from them, he is digging holes on the beach. As they fill up with water the two speculate on what's really going on (and it's clear they also know a fair bit about some of the other stories in the book).

The Sing of the Shore is a bout a brother and sister who run a fading campsite. Present and past blur together as they wander the fields and lanes both as children and adults (maybe 30 years later?) There's no sign or world now of the parents who appear in the "past" but nor of the boy who came to stay when Kensa was twelve, and then vanished. As with The Dishes there are perhaps hints to be decoded in the story but they almost seem to be there to tease the reader: all that is sure is the decaying site on a windy headland with the caves beneath and over it all that sound, the sing of the shore.

By-the-Wind Sailors is named for creatures that float where the wind blows them - here a family of three, homeless, shifting between caravans, flats over shops, garden huts and other semi-permanent accommodation. It goes on year after year, with the main feature of interest being the weather - you can learn to endure anything , except when you can't. A shifty, sad final story in this excellent volume, which has atmosphere in spades (make that children's, beach spades). It's a lovely book - not only in the writing but in the cover design too which is, sadly, uncredited.

As these stories grow, ramify, refer to one another and diverge again, Wood creates something more than simply a collection, she creates a world. An odd world with a lot of shade and may in between places, but also an intriguing, glinting world. Strongly recommended.

For more about this book, see the publisher's website.

Review - Terror Tales of Cornwall, ed by Paul Finch

Terror Tales of Cornwall

ed Paul Finch

Telos Publishing Ltd, 2017

PB, 283pp

This review first appeared in The Ghosts and Scholars MR James Newsletter, No 32, Autumn 2017.

I'm grateful for a review copy of this book.

This isn’t a collection of traditional ghost stories or folktales. Rather, the stories in this book are by modern authors. Between the stories are short essays about mysterious Cornwall, and about some of the authors who have been inspired by it. Here we meet Daphne du Maurier, but also the Morgawr, or Cornish sea-monster, fairies, piskies, giants, smugglers, murderers and many more. These sections draw both on traditions and more recent sightings and claims. These essays don't attempt to introduce the stories directly although there are some resonances - but they powerfully add to the mood of the book.

There is a good overall liminal sense to this collection. A county unlike any other in England (I write "in England" advisedly, given some of the content here), Cornwall juts out into the Atlantic Ocean, putting it at more than just a physical distance from the rest of the country. There are other boundaries as well: the distinction between the remote, inner landscape and the popular seaside resorts; between the locals and the visitors; the new and the old; the safe and the - unsafe. Boundaries seem to be especially significant places in horror. We can approach them. We can get too close. Things can come over. All of this creates endless opportunities for that chilling feeling you get when, on the warmest day, a cloud hides the sun.

And the authors take full advantage. Tasked with writing tales "of Cornwall" some have produced stories that draw heavily on Cornish tradition, atmosphere and themes, while some are simply set in Cornwall (and which might perhaps have equally been set anywhere else). I'm glad to say that the former are in the majority as that seems more in the spirit of the exercise, although there are some strong stories in both categories.

The book contains sixteen stories in all. In We Who Sing Beneath the Ground (Mark Morris) a dedicated teacher crosses a boundary when she follows up a non-attending pupil, turning up late one evening at the dilapidated farm where he lives to find all the lights out. But there's worse to come. This was a good opening story, bringing in a distinctly Cornish angle as well as an element of the fantastic that fitted well with the guidebook-style commentaries on Cornish myths and monsters that alternate with the stories themselves. As its title suggests In the Light of St Ives (Ray Cluley) also features light and dark, when a young artists tries to erase her work because the colours – particular colours – are seeping out. Again this reflects a distinctly Cornish theme - the artistic colony of St Ives – and has a nice effect of "pleasing terror" as we gradually discern what is wrong.

Trouble at Botathan (Reggie Oliver) is an authentically Jamesian story in which a young undergraduate discovers a harrowing narrative hidden in the library of a remote house on Bodmin Moor. It reveals a ghastly crime, and takes him out to a mysterious wood with its own guardian.

Mebyon versus Suna (John Whitbourn) begins as a more lighthearted tale and one which takes place outside Cornwall. It illustrates what happens when frictions between the Celt and Saxon come to the surface in the borderlands between two ancient kingdoms (and also perhaps pokes gentle fun at modern nationalisms which see the past through such 19th century, invented lenses). There is less terror here, perhaps – or so it seems – but there is a nice twist.

The Unseen (Paul Edwards) is perhaps only incidentally Cornish but is a horror story that would feel perfectly at home in one of the classic 1970s Pan anthologies, focussing on a particularly nasty DVD and a, shall we say, lacklustre father who allows his obsession with it to lead him astray. it's effective, nicely done and will stay with the reader. Dragon Path (Jacqueline Simpson) on the other hand is wonderfully shameless in its pillaging and piling up of the most vainglorious aspects of modern Celticism and New Age syncretism, to the point where you feel that in his showdown on Bodmin Moor the central character Mick is really going to come unstuck. But then something very nasty happens and it becomes a very real story. Great fun.

The Old Traditions are Best (Paul Finch) draws on that eerie atmosphere that can attend a fair, a carnival or - as here - a village festival (the scariest killings in Midsomer Murders take place at the Village Fete, don't they?) when the masks, the costumes and the ritual take over and the humanity is lost. Again drawing on custom and tradition, this was one of my favourite stories in the book

The Uncertainty of Earthly Things (Mark Valentine) arguably isn't actually terror or horror, it's more one of those epiphanies where a veil is split showing something else behind the solidity of life. The indifference of that something can provoke horror, blessed relief or curiosity. Here, it's a mixture of the three. This was another of my favourites, not least for the contrast between the cosy, dusty life of its museum curator protagonist and the truth of what is revealed. 

His Anger Was Kindled (Kate Farrell) is genuinely spine chilling, even if, I think only Cornish. I enjoyed the collision between a single minded elderly clergyman and the bureaucrat despatched to fire him (even if the story does ride roughshod over how things actually happen in the Church of England). Another story that simply uses a Cornish location is Four Windows and a Door (DP Watt) allows childlike innocence to collide with something very... un-innocent. All the stronger for being, at its heart, mysterious, this story does share a feature with The Memory of Stone (Sarah Singleton) - a father who, following a catastrophe, retires to brood on the Cornish coast. Watt's protagonist is easier to sympathise with than Singleton's, a middle aged man who turns stalker when he meets an attractive young woman, thereby bringing disgrace on himself and I found myself rather hoping that the strange pebble-leaving creatures would harm him. But maybe they're just an externalisation of the shame and self disgust he feels?

Claws (Steve Jordan) echoes The Old Traditions are Best in exploring brash, jangling creepiness - this time of an amusement arcade. The Cornish angle comes from the presence of something else, something bent on making mischief. Again, in the way that this something strikes against guilty and innocent alike, the story provides a true sense of horror as does A Beast by Any Other Name (Adrian Cole) which is, surprisingly, the only story in the book to feature the mines and caverns of Cornwall, pairing them with another legends, that of the Beast of Bodmin. But something more evil, more dangerous than a mere monster is at work here. A creepy, effective story – one of those where a subtle change at the end casts a new light on the earlier narrative.

Moon Blood-Red, Tide Turning (Mark Samuels) is another little mystery. Creepy, not particularly rooted in anything Cornish, it takes its impetus, as it were, from the artifice of the theatre. Still chilling, mind.

In Shelter from the Storm (Ian Hunter) a group of Explorer Scouts on a training walk take shelter (from a storm) and foolishly stumble into something ancient that they ought to have left alone. While pretty chilling, I felt at times was slightly stretching what the boys would actually do – yes, I know, going into the old creepy house/ castle/ church despite the obvious scariness of the place is a bit of a cliche and Hunter provides good motivation for that, but perhaps less so for what they do next.

The last story, Losing its Identity (Thana Niveau) was, for me, the strangest in the book (and my very favourite). Framed by extracts from the Shipping Forecast, that invocation of British maritime topography, it is almost science-fictional in one respect, the treatment of a future of rising sea levels and increasing storms which is, bit by bit, drowning Cornwall. There's nothing supernatural, nothing eerily or creepily horrible in this and in some respects it's rather a gentle story. But it is one that rather haunts me.

Overall, this is a strong collection. The "Cornish" theme, however the particular authors choose to interpret it, delivers a focus which adds to the overall sense of place. For example, we hear the same place names repeated from story to story. A grumble in one story about the time taken to get to Penzance on the train sheds light on a couple of others. The factual information about wreckers and the murder of shipwrecked sailors is at the back of one's mind in one or two other places even if those aren't central events in them, as are the more modern examples of the weird which add an "anything can happen" sense to the stories (which are mainly set in the present, or recent past). Perhaps most of all, the sheer chanciness of life on this peninsula, especially when that life depends on the sea, injects an element of potential danger and menace that pervades every story in the book, almost as though the reader can taste the salt and hear the murmur of the waves.

Strongly recommended, whether you are after a good tingle of terror or just a dollop of satisfying atmosphere.