Seascraper
by Benjamin Wood
You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.
Seascraper follows the daily trials of Tom Flett, a “shanker” who scrapes the sand for its yield at low tide with his trusty horse and wagon, risking his life in a job that is simultaneously boring and dangerous. Tom is clearly in the Hardyesque tradition of unworldly young men who tend the land or work with their hands (Gabriel Oak, Jude Fawley), and it’s this that alerts us to his vulnerability to charmers and chancers.
When the latest suitor turns out to be a slick American film director named Edgar Acheson, Tom sees his chance of escape. Edgar is scouting locations for a movie adaptation and immediately looks to recruit Tom as his local guide, “a guy who knows the beach, the tides”.
What makes Wood’s writing such a pleasure is his attentiveness to the prosaic details of everyday life. Whether it’s harnessing a horse, cooking a fry-up or tuning a guitar, he transforms the quotidian into the poetic, making the exactitude of each task sing on the page. The book is full of visceral and evocative descriptions of the natural world, “the festering scent of bladderwrack … a strange, spasmodic crunch each time the wheels pass over razor shells and gnarls of driftwood … undulating sand that gives beneath the wheels as readily as butter”. He’s equally adept at creating warm and believable characters whose deep humanity makes you want to spend time in their company. Jude Cook
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