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Gathering The WaterEditions
ReviewRejoice. After his recent diversion into crime novels, Robert Edric has returned with an ambivalent technician to monitor the disintegration of a community into catastrophe. Gathering The Water is the succinct tale of an engineer called Charles Weightman who has been sent to oversee the flooding of a valley near Halifax following the construction of a dam in 1848. ‘To hear the Board men speak, you might think I had been bound for a wilderness of unmapped moor crying out only for the civilizing of their scheme.’ Throughout Gathering The Water the elements are out of kilter, not just in the main conceit of the artificial flood but in the smallest personal details. At the end of the chapter in which Weightman moves into his house, there is a three-line paragraph that is inimitably Edric, in which Weightman tells us that his fire has ‘dislodged some soot, which fell in the afternoon and laid its fine black dust over everything I set out.’ All such precise information belongs both to a vivid setting of characters into their circumstances and also to a wider, existential drama. Edric uses few subordinate clauses and is spare with adjectives and adverbs. His superb prose has the authority necessary to carry off its charge of imagery. If a man goes outside and no one is about, it is a cosmic void; if he feels cold, it is a spiritual chill. It is in the details that we see the society falling apart: the collapse of systems of belief is implicit in the inspired description of a pike taking a duck. Weightman is himself a damaged man, grieving for his recently dead fiancée. Although conscientious, he is acutely aware of the disjunction between his masters’ plans and their impact on the locals who do not understand what is happening and can only explain it through superstition and hatred. Likewise between God’s ideal Creation and what is really to be found ‘upon the scales of loss and gain’. This is a book shot through with images of loss, a meticulously surveyed landscape that remains an ‘unchartered territory of grief and longing’. ‘A man who was lost there would not find himself on these [the Board’s] charts.’ Graham Swift wrote in a recently published essay, ‘The local is the route and the key to the universal, if only because it is a universal law that all experience is local and has to be placed.’ The same might equally be said about time in the context of historical novels, and both points could be used in relation to Robert Edric’s work. Few other writers display his ability to write with conviction on multiple levels. Gathering The Water belongs with a group of his novels including The Broken Lands, In Desolate Heaven From a review in the Daily Telegraph - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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