04-07-2025
He's one of the finest British novelists you've never heard of
Benjamin Wood is one of the finest British novelists of his generation, but you've probably never heard of him. The 44-year-old author from Stockport has written five psychologically suspenseful books with stories that are so unique and specific, it feels like they must come directly from real life.
His previous book, The Young Accomplice (2022), was about two idealistic 1950s architects who dream of recreating Frank Lloyd Wright's communal-living project at their Surrey farm. His second novel, The Ecliptic (2015), was narrated by a 1960s Scottish painter who retreats to an artists' colony on a Turkish island.
Woods tends to follow working-class loners who are fascinated by human creativity but get dragged down by treachery, madness or something from their past. In his latest — and shortest — novel, Seascraper, people are quite literally pulled under the earth into the 'sinkpits' of a beach, which look like 'pudding batter'. Thomas Flett, a 20-year-old cart shanker (a kind of shrimper), knows the beach well. He warns outsiders: 'The sand's got arms in different places, see — if you're not careful or you're stupid, you'll get dragged below.'
Thomas is working his grandfather's gruelling trade, scraping for shrimp on the fictional Longferry beach (which resembles the Lancashire coast) in the 1960s. He's a frustrated folk musician who lives a slow and lonely life with his young, flirtatious mother, Lillian, while secretly pining for Joan, who works in the post office.
The premise seems humdrum and unpromising, but there is plenty of intrigue: a missing father whom Thomas has never known and is rumoured to have been his mother's school teacher ('he got her in the family way at fifteen years of age') and, later, a mysterious Hollywood film director who wants to use the beach as a location.
And yet so much of the drama is simply in the tension of Wood's sentences, which hook you from the beginning. Take this passage from the opening paragraph: 'There's all sorts in the water now that wasn't there when he was just a lad. Strange chemicals and pesticides and sewage. Barely a few weeks ago there was a putrid fatty sheen upon the sand from east to west; a month before he waded in a residue of foam that reeked of curdled milk as he approached the shallows. Fleeting things, but if you're asking him they augur trouble — it's been hard to sleep of late.'
This world of dadding lines, motor rigs and fishing regulations is disrupted by Edgar Acheson, a tall, seemingly self-assured American who intends to make a film in Longferry with Henry Fonda as the lead. Thomas is immediately struck by Edgar's 'deep-set eyes as brown as bladderwrack, his dark hair combed in floppy waves'. The director arrives at Thomas and Lillian's home bearing good-quality rib-eye steaks and proffering a magazine article in which he is pictured, captioned as the director of a film called The Cutting Room.
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Now he's in preproduction for his adaptation of a book called The Outermost and believes Longferry can double as 1880s costal Maine, a 'foggy little town where everything's a bit unusual'. He wants Thomas to help him to navigate the beach and 'the way of life out there' for a fee of £100. This is several months' worth of pay, allowing Thomas more time to work on his music. Although he appears surly, excitement courses through him: 'There's now a cool, soft, effervescent feeling in his blood, a sense of possibility that's spreading from his heart down to his ingrown toenails.' Edgar is the most fascinating man Thomas has encountered and he allows Thomas to entertain fantasies of escaping Longferry to fulfil his musical ambitions.
If there is an abiding theme to Wood's writing it is the dreams and delusions of big thinkers and the issues that arise when their creativity is thwarted. As Joan tells Thomas, 'Perhaps I'm wrong, but aren't you dead if you're not dreaming?' They are discussing Rupert Brooke's romantic poem Day That I Have Loved, which is quoted in the fictional book The Outermost and is also the epigraph to Seascraper. Brooke evokes the passing of a perfect day, which leaves the sun setting over 'the drear waste darkening'. It's a phrase that makes Thomas think about the 'hopelessness' that sometimes engulfs him.
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The novel is also set mostly over one day in Thomas's life in which his usual punishing routine — 'all those dreary shifts at sea' — is disturbed. The reality of shanking is wonderfully evoked, the 'pervasive sweat and shrimp rot fish guts, crab flesh, seaweed, dander, forage, gull shit, horse dung' clogging up his pores and fingernails. Like the experimental architects in The Young Accomplice, Thomas is often battling the elements, the slapping rain and gnawing wind. Curiously, Wood decided to embrace the weather when he was writing Seascraper, working outdoors for the first time and composing the book in longhand. The result is a fiercely atmospheric novel that engages the senses.
There's even some music that you can listen to. If you follow a link to the publisher's website, you'll find a recording of Thomas's poignant dream song written and sung by the novelist. Wood has confessed that he also dreamt of a record deal in his twenties, revealing in the book's final page the author as the ultimate frustrated creative.
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking £14.99 pp176). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
