On a Saturday morning there is a decision to be made. There will be an email from Daunts Bookshop wanting to share with me their five book choices for the week. Will I open the email or just leave it? If I open it then the chances are I will buy one of those books. Saturday mornings can prove expensive but then again I have been introduced to some great new authors and some wonderful reading. So, this is how I came to know of Benjamin Wood and his book Seascraper.
An author of whom I have never heard: he has written 4 previous novels and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at King’s College London. Googling him, as I tend to do, I find he is young with rather moody, good looks that would do well in front of a film camera. He grew up in Merseyside so I’m imagining him with a soft, educated, Liverpool accent. Gracious, enough! Back to this book, a novella really, as it is under 200 pages.
There must be so many people who would recognise themselves within this story. There will always be those who feel threatened by opportunity and simply do not have the confidence to take that step forward. Circumstance often has invisible threads that tether people to a certain situation, place, job or relationship and all their plans and hopes are destined to remain dreams.
Thomas is one such. He is a shanker, scraping the beaches for shrimp and spending his afternoons selling his wares. It was his grandfather’s business, if it can be called such a thing, working through gloom and rain and fog with a horse and cart. Lacking in relatives, particularly a father, Thomas was pulled out of school to help more and more frequently until his education ceased to exist and possibilities shrivelled and died. Days were grey, both literally and inside Thomas’s head, until amazingly, an American film director walks through his mother’s front door and into his life.
He brings colour, excitement and most of all hope. He wants Thomas to take him onto the beach, to show him the old skills that are used everyday. He wants to experience the atmosphere; to smell and feel the sea mists. He offers Thomas a part in a film he plans to make. He just has to be himself … and, there is money involved, big money to anyone in this poor seaside community.
Thomas is shaken from his routine and somehow it seems possible to think about choice and change. He plays the guitar and sings, but only to his horse, in the run-down shack that passes as a stable. He continually promises himself he will go to the folk club, just as he promises himself that he will ask Joan down the road out on a date, maybe to the pictures. Suddenly both enterprises don’t seem so terrifying. And then the future delights fall apart. The so-called film director is not all he seems and of course the cheque will bounce. However, the door has been opened and Thomas has had the chance to peer through. The days ahead may not offer riches and glitz but he can grasp that there is possibility, and small but maybe enchanting opportunities on the horizon.
Benjamin Wood prefaces his story with words by Rupert Brooke:
Beyond the shifting cold twilight,
Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming,
There’ll be no port, no dawn-lit islands! But the drear
Waste darkening, and, at length, flame ultimate on the deep.
I recognised this as Rupert Brooke but couldn’t name the poem. Looking it up I find it is from ‘Day that I have loved.’
It is a brilliant choice of words for this story. ‘The drear waste darkening’ perfectly describes both the cold, grey beaches early in the morning and, actually, Thomas’s state of mind as the narrative begins.
This is an unusual book written by a confident, talented writer. Maybe you would like it?
Happy reading.