3 hours ago
5
Living is hard emotional work – until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate the conscience: the failures of kindness, the misjudged words that can’t be unsaid, the feelings left catastrophically unexpressed. Crimes of the heart – and sometimes, worse.
The malaise of regret and the yearning for absolution vibrate through Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest work of fiction, a wildly atmospheric, deceptively simple tale that borrows tropes from cosy crime only to snare you into something deeper, darker and more chilling.
The driving animus of Hurley’s fiction has always been place. In his bestselling debut, The Loney, set in Morecambe Bay, and the folk-horror works that followed – Barrowbeck, Devil’s Day and Starve Acre – he evokes the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, idiosyncratic brushstrokes that bring the reader into territory as psychic, even mythic, as it is physical. In Saltwash, the titular town of his new novel is a semi-abandoned coastal resort whose estuary has become “suckled down to a delta of dark streams and vast sandbanks”, and on whose tattered streets “the neglect … was so rife as to seem wilful”. Saltwash is not so much a town as a state of mind: one that the novel’s septuagenarian protagonist, Tom Shift, will be forced to reckon with during the course of his brief but soul-shaking visit.
He arrives in the pounding rain for a meeting proposed by Oliver, the mercurial, enigmatic penpal brokered for him by the clinic where he goes for therapy. But Tom is drawn to their rendezvous at the crumbling Castle Hotel as much by curiosity as by friendship. Why do Oliver’s letters, though larded with literary allusions to mortality, shy away from the intended subject of their correspondence – which is that both of them are dying?
While the doomed Tom waits for the doomed Oliver in the hotel bar – all mildewed walls, surly staff and peeling stucco – more elderly people appear, as if for a reunion. Maniacally talkative, and dressed in the finery of their younger incarnations, they are cartoonishly drawn yet ghoulishly credible, and as the booze flows it emerges that they, too, are waiting for Oliver, and this is an annual party, the high point of which is to be a lottery.
When Oliver finally appears, he immediately takes over the show, scattering bons mots and performing magic tricks with a verve and panache at odds with his unwashed clothes and skeletal appearance. As the night wears on, Tom catches dark hints about some of the other guests, but remains an innocent if increasingly anxious bystander to their simmering conflicts and intrigues. Yet as the meal is served – starting with an eel, celery and tomato soup so vile that one of the party vomits – his feeling that “he needed to be that rare thing, a better person” begins to build to a pitch he can’t ignore. Something is horribly awry here. Why is Tom, the only newcomer to the annual gathering, forbidden to know more about the lottery? And why is everyone so desperate to win?
Easy to read but challenging to process, the novel left me entertained, but also feeling as raw, unsettled and existentially shaken as Tom, its hapless everyman. And perhaps that is exactly the intention. While Saltwash may not be the ideal Christmas gift for anyone confronting their mortality, for some unexamined souls it may be perfect. Welcoming on the outside, and increasingly unnerving as you reach the core of its gruesome, shocking proposition, Hurley’s latest offering is Heart of Darkness wrapped in candy.
Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (£16.99. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
