By Barney Norris
Published by Doubleday
The “undercurrent” of Barney Norris’s title is both actual and metaphorical. The novel opens at a wedding where Ed meets Amy, who claims that he rescued her from drowning when they were both children. Moreover, it’s a novel about the “secret currents which align our lives” as Ed gradually moves out of a relationship with his long-term partner, Juliet and into one with Amy, via flashbacks and reflections.
Like Norris’s play We Started to Sing, which ran at London’s Arcola Theatre earlier this year, some of the source material for this novel is inspired by Norris’s own family – as he explores the stories of Ed’s predecessors. His grandparents, for example, met in India in 1911 and ended up on a sheep farm in Wales beset by tragedy. Then there’s Ed’s childhood on the same farm.
It’s an accessible, often quite direct novel which often uses incisively short sentences such as “Amy leaves for Kuala Lumpur a few days later. The period that follows is a strange dreamtime”. On the other hand, it can also stray into lyrical subtext and it pulls the reader up short when he observes, for example: “I am cast down in the flood of remembrance” or “All cities are built like maps of a mind, and when you spend time in them they come to map your own, you can’t help but fall into the rhythms offered up to you”.
This is a beautiful, very readable novel in which the characterisation (especially Amy and Ed’s stepfather, Chris) is powerful.
Susan Elkin interviewed Barney Norris in the June issue of Ink Pellet.
Review by Susan Elkin