Diane Setterfield, Black Swan, 2018
One midwinter night, a girl is found drowned in the river Thames. Ms Setterfield weaves a complex story in and out of the lives of those involved to an extent that I felt part of that nineteenth century community.
The river Thames is a constant presence in the book; within the story, but also as a metaphor for life, and storytelling. Its banks are never far from the story as the undrowned girl affects first the lives of those at the Swan Inn, where she is taken to be revived. We get to know all these characters, along with others, as everybody wonders who she is.
I guess, like a river, the pace is slow to begin with. We have to spend time with the characters to understand something about them. The mystery of the girl’s identity bobs along through the whole story.
I found that my interest wavered a bit during the second quarter of the book as we see the situation from the standpoint of many characters and I wasn’t sure who was who and which ones were the main characters. But I persevered and the need to keep reading to learn the truth, as well as to root for Rita, the nurse, and Armstrong, the farmer, kept me going.
The first half of the book I read too slowly, I lost track of some characters, but I raced through the second half as the current took hold and I felt an urgency to know what happened. I delighted in sharing the story with the characters and I felt that, as the pace quickened, my enjoyment switched from the joy in the details to the excitement of the climax.
Most of these characters are people I would happily spend time with and I felt always that I could trust Ms Setterfield with the telling of this story. The story feels as if it is being read to you. The way the details are relayed shows a storyteller’s gift and skill and there are many memorable phrases or sentences. I laughed when a character notes that a pig told her what to do about a problem.
Just before the end of the book I began to write out some of these wonderfully rich phrases, such as a flood in a house ‘that shifted and shimmered like a thing making up its mind.’ And ‘they breathed the minutes in and out until they made an hour.’ I intended to go through the story once I’d finished and find other examples that I’d noticed as I read, but when I got to the end and retraced my steps, it was impossible to find the places and phrases again, without rereading the whole book. The search seemed just as difficult as it is to go back to look for something you dropped in a river a while ago. Tricky things, rivers.
December 2022
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