Reviews
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain
Rebecca Foster
Barney Norris
Doubleday, 288pp
Playwright Barney Norris, still in his twenties, won the
Critics' Circle and Off West End Awards for Visitors. He followed
this with a second play, Eventide. For his contributions to theatre
the Evening Standard listed him amongst their most influential
Londoners last year. It's no surprise, then, that there's something
a little staged to his debut novel, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded
Plain. The lives of the book's five narrators collide one night
when a car hits a moped in Salisbury town centre. We hear from each
protagonist in turn as they reflect on their losses and wonder
whether religion - represented by Salisbury Cathedral and the
scripture and rituals of Christianity - might be able to help.
A poetic prologue sets the characters' tragedies in perspective
by invoking the wonder and vastness of Wiltshire's prehistory. 'The
startled world, stirred by this confluence of [five] riverways,
started to sing bright notes into the blue air. A great chord rang
out in the deep heart of England'; early settlers paid homage by
building Stonehenge and then, once pagan religion had ceded to
Christianity, a church. 'The next iteration of the song in stone
was a cathedral built in the middle of a hill fort.' First at Old
Sarum and then at its new site, initial narrator Liam imagines the
cathedral serving for generations as a beacon of human longing:
'Salisbury Cathedral cutting the air is a diagram of prayer, the
hope at the centre of my life expressed as the burning arrow of the
spire shot into the sky, asking us to look up beyond the everyday …
and imagine something greater than we are.'
The transition from that lofty aspiration to the everyday grind
is abrupt as the narration passes over to Rita, a sixty-something
flower-seller who gets herself in trouble with the police for
selling marijuana on the side. 'My Salisbury [is] the other city,
the one you don't see from the cathedral,' she declares, where a
seedy route takes you 'past the nightclub and the strip club and
the dodgy Chinese and the cheap hotel.' In italicized flashbacks,
Rita recounts how she fell in love with Jonno at age 17, only for
him to cheat on her and leave her to raise their son alone. Now
she's a grandmother, but still can't seem to get her life together.
'I was going down and I'd taken it all with me, all my life fallen
in on my head; I felt like f***ing Samson,' she says. Rita's
section is characterised by constant cursing; she keeps repeating
how she has f***ed everything up. I was reminded of Francis Rebecca
Foster is a freelance editor and book reviewer for various print
and online publications in the US and UK. Spufford's 'Human
Propensity to F*** Things Up' or 'HPtFtU', his shorthand for
original sin in Unapologetic.
If Rita's the most obvious sinner, though, she's also the one
most willing to look for divine help. 'You wouldn't think I'm a
reader to look at me, but I read all the religious books,' she
insists, and later she remarks to another character that the Bible
is like 'a How to guide. I've read all the books of all the
different religions. I go back to them a lot, for advice, for
comfort, to make me feel better.' Rita is the liveliest and most
engaging character in the novel, difficult as her expletive-strewn
narrative might be to traverse. In the chapters that follow we also
meet Sam, a fifteen-year-old whose father is dying of lung cancer;
George, an elderly widower who may be forced to give up the family
farm; Alison, a school secretary who sinks into depression whilst
her husband is serving in Afghanistan; and Liam, recently returned
to Salisbury to work as a security guard at Old Sarum. Although the
five are ostensibly connected by the car crash - one the victim,
one the driver, and the others observers and recipients of the news
- they have actually crossed paths in various ways before. Rita is
a common link: two characters speak with her at her flower stall;
George and his wife once let her camp on their land when she had
nowhere else to go; and she was Liam's drug dealer when he was a
teenager.
It's not exactly a unique story - a coincidence binding
disparate characters is a staple of fiction as well as film - but
the Salisbury setting lends a distinctive flavour. The cathedral
itself is the unifying element. George has conflicting ideas as he
looks up at it: on the one hand it's an indifferent monolith ('it
didn't seem to care about me at all'); on the other hand, being
near it calms his thoughts, as it does for Alison when she walks
around the cathedral close. Sam stumbles upon a cathedral service
in progress and the ritual lightens his spirits: 'A hymn, nothing
more than a tune and a string of words someone had invented, was
somehow making things feel better.' As a narrator, Sam has
profundity beyond his years; especially when he attempts to
psychoanalyze his own mother, he doesn't sound like a teenager,
making his the least authentic of the voices.
From his Old Sarum vantage point, Liam views the cathedral as an
'illustration of the way all our ordinary acts, our cups of tea and
walks to the postbox and phone bills and potato peelings, are shot
through with a heartbreaking and extraordinary love. That there
exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as
heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral.' Love
and a uniting song: like David Nicholls, Norris prizes emotional
connection and delivers a theatrical plot. If he can avoid the more
clichéd aspects of a novel like One Day, he could have a long
career in fiction ahead of him.