BookJack talks about a new novel by the English writer Diana Setterfield "While the River Flows" (translated by V. Dorogokupli), which will be published on May 20. Setterfield is the author of the bestselling The Thirteenth Tale (2006), a neo-Victorian novel about family secrets that has been translated into over 30 languages.
Diane Setterfield is a British author. Her bestselling novel, The Thirteenth Tale (2006) was published in 38 countries worldwide and has sold more than three million copies. It was number one in the New York Times hardback fiction list for three weeks and is enjoyed as much for being ‘a love letter to reading’ as for its mystery and style. Her second novel, Bellman & Black (2013 is a genre-defying tale of rooks and Victorian retail. January 2019 sees the publication of her new title, Once Upon a River, which has been called 'bewitching' and 'enchanting'.
The success of Diana Setterfield's Thirteenth Tale - dark and mesmerizing, at the same time exquisitely literary and frighteningly vital - was so loud and global that many novels ahead provided the writer with the most intent and predominantly benevolent reader attention. And although Setterfield's second book, Bellman & Black, a leisurely production drama from the life of Victorian gravediggers, even in its best fragments fell short of the level of The Thirteenth Tale, the public was waiting with understandable impatience for the third novel.
The bad news is that As Long As The River Flows, once again, there is no comparison with Setterfield's literary debut, who, it seems, is destined to remain isolated and unique, as if brought into the writer's head by a mysterious breath of another world. However (and this is undoubtedly good news), compared to the uneven and drawn-out Bellman and Black, “While the River Flows,” a step, if not strictly forward, then at least in the right direction. Having stopped relying on scraps of fading inspiration, Setterfield is confidently moving towards a strong, reflective and in its own way attractive professionalism.
One rainy night, a wounded stranger with a dead child in his arms bursts into the door of the Swan inn, located on the very bank of the Thames. Local medicine Rita Sunday calms the frightened regulars to death and provides the unfortunate first aid, but immediately a new - much more significant - reason appears for the unrest: the girl, whom everyone in the audience considered drowned, suddenly comes back to life.
At this point, the novel splits into three arms. The little pseudo-prisoner is intertwined in the lives of several people living in the neighborhood at once. The wealthy Vaughan couple, Anthony and Helena, believe that she is their daughter Amelia, who was abducted two years earlier. Virtuous, free-thinking and educated black farmer Robert Armstrong believes that the girl is his miraculously surviving granddaughter Alice, the illegitimate daughter of his eldest dissolute son, who was tried to drown by a desperate mother abandoned by her lover. And Lily White, the priest's malacho housekeeper, who lives in a gloomy hut in a swamp and keeps some dark secret in the past, is convinced that it is her little sister Anna, who drowned many years ago, miraculously returned to the world of the living. Well, for greater ominousness, somewhere on the dark backdrop looms the figure of the Silent Man - either the good or the evil genius of the Thames, who once went to the “opposite side of the river”, to the kingdom of water goblins, to return from there his drowned little daughter, and now occasionally helping people in trouble on the water.
The image of the river is generally key for the entire novel: in fact, the Thames - cruel, wayward and at the same time beneficent - is almost its main heroine, whose character determines the pace and manner of the story. “Having undertaken a trip along its river bed by boat or on foot - mile after mile - you will very soon notice that purposefulness is not one of its main advantages,” Setterfield writes about the Thames, quite unequivocally signaling to the reader that the plot in the novel will develop nonlinearly. and unhurriedly - exactly as the Thames rolls its waters from an inconspicuous source to the sea.
Starting with a dramatic appearance in a hotel of a man with a dead girl in his arms, the novel first lays a 200-page loop into the past and continues to loop in the same vein, right up to a somewhat crumpled but generally satisfactory denouement. The forces of evil (in "The Thirteenth Tale" are eerily convincing, and even in "Bellman and Black" who have not completely lost their former splendor) this time shyly tread the wings almost until the end, only occasionally indicating their presence with unmotivated antics and heavy sighs, therefore, despite Despite the author's obvious desire to thicken the darkness, the general atmosphere inside the book remains intimate, reliable and comfortable. And all sorts of amusements (like, for example, a fascinating immersion in the field of photographic art of the Victorian era), offered to the reader in the course of a measured voyage, do not allow the text to be reproached for excessive wateriness.
In a word, it seems that, realizing her own limitations, Diana Setterfield rethought her professional path and began to do what she really loves and can do well. “While the River Flows” is not an outstanding, but very solid and charming text in the Victorian collage genre, which, however, is not devoid of such signs of relevance as strong female characters and noble Afro-Britons (somewhat unexpected in the midst of lily-white, conservative and patriarchal England of the late 19th century). Setterfield was unable to repeat the miracle that The Thirteenth Tale was definitely not, but - and this, in fact, is also a miracle in some way, albeit a smaller caliber - she managed to develop her own recognizable writing style and voice, quite capable, if not bewitching a new army of admirers, then in any case keep and protect from disappointment a significant part of the old.
This article was sponsored by Nadejda Osadcii
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