Edward Parnell

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country


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rocking horse, they ended up using a near-identical one with a blonde, not dark, mane.

      ¶¶ When I later examine the solid-feeling shelves, I find they contain first editions of Alan Garner’s Red Shift and The Owl Service – two more important books from my childhood in which the past parallels the present. Neither, however, was the volume that flew out into the room; its identity must remain a mystery, as in the excitement I forgot to check.

      *** Lloyd Parry provides the introduction to Lucy Boston’s posthumously published collection of stories written in the 1930s, Curfew & Other Eerie Tales; the title piece is particularly effective, along with the menacing water tower of ‘Pollution’.

       DARK WATERS

      Waterland was published in 1983 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the same year. It is a novel about the forces inherent in human nature that tear people and families apart, how past events haunt the present. But, above all, for me it’s a book about the unnerving flat landscape of my youth. Though I must qualify this, because it would be wrong to regard the Fens as forming a solid, distinctive whole; the country of my childhood had its own boundaries based upon the places we’d visit regularly as a family, stretching a varying number of miles in each direction from our house, but outside of which the more removed outposts of flatness seemed alien and otherworldly. One such locality that we occasionally passed through was the tiny cluster of residences that formed the village of Twenty. In 1982 it acquired a new black-lettered sign that sat below its official name – ‘Twinned with the Moon’ it read; soon afterwards some local joker spray-painted the retort ‘No Atmosphere’ beneath.

      The narrator of Waterland, Tom Crick, is a history teacher who is being encouraged to take early retirement due to budgetary restraints at his school. ‘We’re cutting back on history,’ his headmaster drily informs him, though ultimately it’s the mental breakdown of his wife that speeds the process along. A precocious boy in his class questions the point of learning about what has gone before: ‘What matters,’ Price declares, ‘is the here and now. Not the past.’ So, in order to demonstrate how history does still result in consequences for the here and now, Tom Crick begins to tell them of his own eddying past, the history of the watery landscape of the ‘fairy-tale place’ of his youth.

      I read the novel aged sixteen, a year or two after my brother had first turned its pages. It’s testament to the book’s power that my father, who usually distracted himself with the crime novels of Ed McBain or the thrillers of Frederick Forsyth (who he recalled meeting when they both worked in King’s Lynn at the end of the 1950s), and my grandfather – more comfortable with the westerns of Louis L’Amour – both seemed to take to it. For me, I think (and probably for them too), Waterland’s initial magic came from its setting; although its events largely occurred in a time well before I was born and in a skewed version of a place some twenty miles distant, it was still a landscape I felt I knew – and a landscape I’d never seen depicted in fiction before.