On a dark midwinter’s night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, an extraordinary event takes place. The regulars are telling stories to while away the dark hours, when the door bursts open on a grievously wounded stranger. In his arms is the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Is it a miracle? Is it magic? Or can science provide an explanation? These questions have many answers, some of them quite dark indeed.
MY THOUGHTS:
'Just because a thing is impossible, doesn't mean it can't happen.'
This novel is bewitching. It's set along a stretch of the rural Thames in the late 1800s, where people were so steeped in stories, folklore and legend that when something startling really bursts into their lives, they can't figure out whether or not they've been sucked into a story themselves. And even we readers start to wonder when the edges begin to blur.
On winter solstice evening, a battered stranger carries the body of small girl over the threshold of the Swan Inn just before he passes out. Both are soaking wet, apparently having just emerged from the river. The little girl appears to be clearly dead, but then she stirs back to life. She cannot speak a word, but her little frame seems so perfect as to be untouched by any wear and tear of life. And she has an endearing, seductive way of making whoever encounters her long to keep her.
Two strong contenders come forward to claim her. Helena and Anthony Vaughan are a young couple whose toddler was kidnapped two years earlier, and it appears their Amelia has been suddenly and miraculously restored to them. But down the river a little way, Bess and Robert Armstrong suspect the child could be their granddaughter Alice, who they've only just found out about. Circumstances align to make them think she could well be the daughter of their rebel son Robin (who I have to say is a proper little turd). And complicating the issue is the parson's housekeeper Lily White, who's convinced the child must be her long-lost sister Ann.
Elsewhere we have Rita Sunday, the nurse who was called to attend the casualties on the night of their arrival, trying to fit pieces together that refuse to click. And Henry Daunt, the girl's unconscious rescuer, comes to with no idea how he found himself in that situation.
I loved every second of this story, partly for the characters and their impossibly helpless situations, but also for Diane Setterfield's magnificent prose. For example, she describes the plight of the bereft Vaughans this way. 'With their words they were trying to bail themselves out, but their words were eggcups and what they were describing was an ocean of absence too vast to be contained in such modest vessels.'
There's a lot about the power of words, sentences, and eventually the skill of full-blown stories. On one hand, the publican's husband Joe is able to maximise even his facial expressions to make him master of the spoken word. Yet on the other, his teenage son Jonathan cannot master the knack of storytelling, for however hard he tries, he's sure to muddle something. And in the middle are try-hards like Newman the gardener, who discovers that even one misplaced word ruins the whole effect. (For no, you can't hare up the river.) The audience is putty in the hands of a good storyteller, and I know full well Diane is playing us that exact same way.
At the end, she sort of releases us back to our normal lives. 'And now dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, surely you have rivers of your own to attend to.'
The thing is, we've been so immersed I'm not sure I want to go back yet. I can still smell the murky river bank, and feel the spray on my face.
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