"Once Upon a River" by Diane Setterfield

A pub by the Thames in the late nineteenth century. The customers (a sort of Greek chorus of delightfully eccentric and innocent and altogether cute set of horny handed sons of toil) gather there every evening to sup their beer and tell stories to one another. Then one night, the winter solstice, a stranger with a gashed face enters, a dead child in his arms. He collapses unconscious and they call for local nurse Rita to treat his injuries and to see what killed the child. The nurse determines that the child is dead. And then she comes to life ...

A mixture of Victorian whodunnit and fairy tale.

The story is told from an omniscient viewpoint and with the rhythm and cadences of fairy tale: "So it was that after the impossible event, and the hour of the first puzzling and wondering, came the various departures from the Swan and the first of the tellings. But finally, while the night was still dark, everybody at last was in bed and the story settled like sediment in the minds of them all, witnesses, tellers, listeners." (1: The Story Travels); "The night closed over them and almost immediately wonderment came to an end." (1: The Story Travels); "Then nobody spoke, and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour." (5: Jonathan Tells a Story). The fairy tale motif extends from the title of the book (Once upon a river) to the final chapter (Happily ever after). There are supernatural events such as the resurrection of the child and, as a repeated motif, the legend of Quietly, a Charon figure, a ghost in a punt who rescues those drowning and either takes them to the safe bank or to the other side of the river. The story takes place between two winter solstices, the turning point coming at the summer solstice, and it is made clear that there is often magic in the air: "As is well known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks." (1: The Story Begins); "And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds." (1: The Story Begins). There is a lot of emphasis on story-telling, especially as the story-tellers in the pub construct and reconstruct stories from the events they have witnessed:

• "A body always tells a story – but this child’s corpse was a blank page." (1: The Corpse without a Story)
• "Telling a thing’s harder than I ever knew." (2: The Story Flourishes)
• "There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all." (2: Some Stories Are Not for Telling)
• "And though eventually there came a time when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on." (5: Happily Ever After)

There is some philosophy:

• "Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second?" (3: Philosophy at the Swan)
• "What’s the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person’s despair?" (4: The Wishing Well)

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• "The cold sliced through her coat without resistance and sharpened its blade against her skin, but she scarcely noticed." (2: Things Don’t Add Up)
• "Blustery rain that excited the surface of the river, turning it into an ever-changing ribbon of pattern and texture." (2: A Mother’s Eyes)
• "The throng thickened to stagnation" (3: Songs)

There is a genius moment of pathetic fallacy:

• "Collodion took them upriver to Rita’s cottage, slicing the water, creating a churn of noise and splash and leaving a long trail of turbulence in its wake." (4: The Wishing Well)

And there are many other great moments:

• "The river had seeped into him and made his lungs marshy." (1: The Story Begins)
• "‘I don’t think you’ll wake a dead man by tickling him,’ said a gravel-digger." (1: The Story Begins)
• "If there had once been curiosity or placidity or impatience here, life had not had time to etch it into permanence." (1: The Corpse without a Story)
• "But having witnessed one miracle, he now saw miracles everywhere: the dark night sky his old eyes had ignored thousands of times before tonight unfolded itself above his head with the vastness of eternal mystery. He stopped to stare up and marvel. The river was splashing and chiming like silver on glass; the sound spilt into his ear, resonated in chambers of his mind he’d never known existed." (1: The Story Travels)
• "For the first time in a lifetime by the river, he noticed – really noticed – that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness; darkness that is also light." (1: The Story Travels)
• "Listen to the sounds between the splashes." (1: Mrs Vaughan and the River Goblins)
• "She thought of the dead souls that are said to live in the river and wondered which ones were racing past her now, spitting at her." (1: Lily’s Nightmare)
• "There must be a great many true things that weren’t in the Bible. It was a big book, but still, it couldn’t have every true thing in it, could it?" (1: Lily’s Nightmare)
• "We all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name." (1: The Sleeper Wakes)
• "A dull sensation that was the disappointment of his marriage." (1: The Sleeper Wakes)
• "Margot nodded at the bargeman to close it behind them. No one had moved. Where the crowd had parted, a curved line of floorboards was still visible. After a moment of stillness when nobody spoke, there came a shuffling of feet, the clearing of throats, and in no time the crowd remassed and the boom of voices was louder even than before." (1: Is It Finished?)
• "She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary. The events of her life, its alterations and meanders, had not been in any way the result of any decisive action on her part, but only accidents of fortune, the hand dealt by an inscrutable God, impositions by other people. She panicked at change, and submitted to it without question. Her only hope for many years had been that things would not get any worse – though generally they had." (2: Things Don’t Add Up)
• "Sometimes I wonder whether I have imagined her … Or whether it is my longing that has – somehow – brought her back from whatever dark place she has been in. In all that pain, I would have sold my soul, given my life, to have her back again." (2: A Mother’s Eyes)
• "It seemed to him that her face was the model from which all human faces were derived, even his own." (2: Which Father?)
• "The way Mr Montgomery pictured the Thames, it was not a current of water at all, but an income stream, dry and papery, and he diverted a share of its bounty every year into his own ledgers and bank accounts and was very grateful to it." (2: Which Father?)
• "‘It is like bone soup,’ said Beszant one night. ‘A smell to make your mouth water and all the flavour of the marrow, but there be nowt to chew on and though you take seven bowls of it you will be just as hungry at the end as when you sat down to the table.’" (2: The Story Flourishes)
• "He stood in his long johns, and reflected that when in the early days of his widowhood he had contemplated the possibility of finding himself undressed in the company of a woman, this was not what he had imagined." (2: Counting)
• "Difference was upsetting, and people armed themselves with aggression when they met it." (2: Gone! Or, Mr Armstrong Goes to Bampton)
• "Some men went about in their armour every day and showed the blades of their swords to all." (2: Gone! Or, Mr Armstrong Goes to Bampton)
• "When lust and scorn live alongside one another in the same heart, they make devilry." (2: Some Stories Are Not for Telling)
• "On a summer’s day winter always feels like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of, and not a thing you have lived." (3: The Longest Day)
• "Sometimes they could hear two at once and the notes bumped into and fell over each other in their ear." (3: The Longest Day)
• "Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings." (4: Truth, Lies and the River)

This is an unusual book. It's Victorian feel extends into the Dickensian division of characters into goody goodies and evil baddies - there is no character of moral ambiguity - but it has beautiful prose.

A number of the motifs seem to echo those of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, another novel with a river and ghostly boatmen.


Also read Bellman & Black by the same author

June 2020