A meeting of misfits: Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed

Spectator

2 days ago

The sea, as you might expect, looms large in Benjamin Wood's finely tuned novella Seascraper. Thomas Flett – one of the most touching protagonists I've encountered in recent years – is barely out of his teens, but he's already battered by toil. His days are spent shanking – gathering shrimps on the beach – with only a horse and cart for company. The setting, gorgeously evoked, is Longferry, a grim coastal town in 1950s Britain. Tom himself appears as if he's been transplanted from the 19th century. The sea, though, brings change, when hidebound past comes crashing against thrusting future.
Tom has a stifling oedipal relationship with his mother, who gave birth, aged 16, after an affair with her history teacher. He escapes drudgery by playing the guitar, though hides this from his mum. He is an innocent, yearning for something better, but not knowing how to reach it. Even the bankteller he fancies seems a distant dream.
When an American film-maker, Edgar Acheson, offers him a job, it seems like a springboard out. Edgar is a misfit in the materialistic world of cinema, as he only wants to make arty films. In the blossoming friendship between the fast-talking Yank and the taciturn Brit you hope Tom won't get hurt.
Relationships between parents and children and our psychological, artistic and intellectual inheritances are among Wood's themes. Tom is haunted by his dead father; Edgar's relationship with his own mother, a novelist whose book he wants to adapt (to win her love), is strained, and he hardly sees his daughter. Tom finds in Edgar the father figure he's always wanted – erudite, articulate and able to subsist on his own talents; and Edgar finds someone who can, perhaps, like him for what he is.
There is much about art and its making as Tom struggles to write songs that aren't borrowed 'from a hundred other tunes', and as Edgar powers on with his monomaniacal drive to make a movie. Questions of deception and trickery also abound. Whether we can trust Edgar or not provides a forceful impetus to the plot.
Seascraper shimmers, salt-flecked and rippling. It swells with tense, memorable moments, as when Edgar and Tom venture on to the shore at night and meet danger. The long beaches, full of hidden traps and shrouded by fog, are a metaphor for Tom's complex state of mind. In the end, his music guides him out of the mire.
You can listen to one of Tom's songs on Wood's website. Look it up. Like this novella, it's poignant, authentic and hopeful.