Sea Defences by Hilary Taylor
Shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize for Debut Novelists Over the Age of 60
| Sea Defences by Hilary Taylor | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: A stunning debut which will have you glued to the page. I'm a sucker for anything set in Norfolk but - even taking that into account - this is top class. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 323 | Date: January 2023 |
| Publisher: Lightning Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1785633355 | |
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When we first meet Rachel Bird she's a trainee vicar, sitting in on a PCC meeting and wondering why they're held when you need to pick the children up. Her husband, Christopher, collects six-year-old Hannah and her elder brother, Jamie, whilst Rachel holds a sobbing parishioner. Thelma's daughter-in-law won't let her see her grandson. Holthorpe, on the Norfolk coast, is a lovely place, but Rachel is struggling to develop a real bond with the parish - and she's in awe of the vicar, Gail, but then she's been doing the job for more than thirty years. Rachel and Christopher hoped that a walk on the beach would do them some good - it was stormy but it was probably what they needed. And then Hannah went missing.
The same storm was affecting someone else rather differently. Mary Farthing lived and had her business at Wetherly End but the cliffs were crumbling and before long the council were likely to evict her from her home on the grounds that it was unsafe. She lived there with her son, twenty-year-old Adam. She would say that he 'didn't have a bad bone in his body' but other people didn't take to him quite so readily. The kindest would say that he 'had his problems'. The reader might well wonder about the autistic spectrum. There doesn't seem to be any harm in his concern for younger children but the fact that he hung around the playground and the school gate worried a lot of people.
Mary was struggling too. Her eyesight was failing. There was a mist in the middle of her field of vision. You might wonder about a detached retina but Hilary Taylor trusts her readers: she lets them come to their own conclusions about what's happening and there's plenty to think about. Rachel and Mary are drawn together. Mary's anti-authority and only trusts reluctantly. She has no religious faith but she understands the depths of Rachel's grief: she's suffered losses of her own. The difficulty is that Adam is nursing a secret and it's impossible to see how Rachel will be able to exercise the forgiveness which is the basis of her faith.
There was no point as I read when I felt judgemental. In a sad story, I felt overwhelming compassion for the situation these ordinary, extraordinary people were struggling with. The telling is factual but poignant and sympathetic and I was stunned by the way Taylor describes the power of the sea: it's totally atmospheric. The writing is brilliant: I've reread this quote so many times that I just about know it by heart:
She loved to walk that ever-shifting boundary between land and ocean, that magical seam, where neither world claimed her. On that smudged line, the stitching is loose. The fabric pulls. No one can say the ocean ends here and the land begins here. Or the other way round. You could fall between the cracks.
This isn't a book I would have read in the normal course of events but a publicist whose judgement I respect tempted me to have a look. I'm so glad that he did and I can't wait to see what Taylor writes next.
For more Norfolk-based literary fiction we can recommend The Listeners by Edward Parnell but we don't think it's as good as Sea Defences.
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