You remember the seven basic plots? Rags to riches, overcoming the monster, the quest? There are various iterations of the theory – some will insist there are ten basic plots, or just five, but whatever, Benjamin Wood’s Seascraper falls firmly into the category of stranger comes to town.
We are somewhere on the west coast of England – Southport, Morecambe, Grange-over-Sands? Like his grandfather before him, Tom Flett is a cart shanker – he sets nets for shrimp at low tide, gathering his catch and then selling it wholesale to a local processor who’ll turn it into potted shrimp. Living alone with his mother, Tom makes just enough from his shanking to keep them fed and clothed. But Tom has bigger dreams: a talent for folk-singing he’s kept secret from everyone, a tortured yearning for his friend’s sister Joan, who works in the post office. Into this over-familiar scenario walks Edgar Atcheson, an American film director with a fat wallet and a convenient interest in the local landscape. Will Tom be his guide? Of course he will. There’s a flare-gun thingy turns up in Tom’s nets early on. Will it go off in the third act? You bet.
I don’t want to write too much about this book, because it wouldn’t be fair. Loads of people are loving it, and I can see how its unthreatening, delicately-wrought lyricism, its almost-folk-horror vibe might appeal. But we’re in 1965 – Peter O’Toole, the Beatles, Elvis and even Profumo are all directly or obliquely name-checked – and Tom, heaven help him, is supposed to be twenty years old. Had to leave school at thirteen because shrimping but has nonetheless found it within himself to slog through War and Peace. Mother – no, sorry, Ma – ‘may have piled on the weight a bit’ but in spite of having been completely ostracised for (oh God) having a baby out of wedlock she’s still a canny woman who knows how to scrub a frying pan and play rummy down the Legion with the girls. Actual age: thirty-six. Reads like: some toothless crone out of a Dickens novel.
The lack of any kind of authenticity is – at least for me – insurmountable. If you want to read about working class youth in the 1960s please do yourself a favour and read Alan Sillitoe or Muriel Spark or Stan Barstow instead. Even if you can get past the novel’s insecure grip on the period in which it’s supposed to be set, the lurching from hard-graft-kitchen-sink to ghost story to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane – all within less than two hundred pages – reveals an even deeper confusion about what, exactly, this novel is supposed to be doing.
Could it be a contender?
If you like Lanny by Max Porter you will love this. If you like Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley you will love this, and I mean that sincerely. I am simply the wrong reader for Seascraper, and one for whom its presence on the Booker longlist will remain a mystery.