Review of Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

In Wood's slim book, a practical young man is scratching out a life in a small seaside English town when an energetic young American filmmaker bursts into town. Thrills and inspiration follow--along with danger and and uncertain implications for the future in this atmospheric, eerie, beautifully written novel.

Young adult Thomas Flett lives a quiet life as a shanker scraping the shore for shrimp with a horse and cart in a small seaside northern English town. He lives with his overbearing mother, who had him when she was quite young and has never revealed much information about his father. They bristle at each other, bicker, yet they live cooperatively: she feeds him and he pays the bills and fixes things around the house.

Thomas's knowledge of the shoreline--its hazards, its topography, and how to stay safe among its many sinkholes and dangers--proves to be a ticket to adventure when he meets Edgar, a passionate American filmmaker eager to use the setting as a backdrop to his new film.

But all Edgar says may not be the truth, and Thomas becomes more and more deeply entrenched in the drama, inspiration, unexpected twists and turns, and whirlwind of the stranger's orbit of existence.

The book has a dark-ethereal quality, and the foggy coast with its literal deadly pitfalls hidden throughout the sand perfectly reflects the mysterious, brooding tone of the book in which the truth is uncertain and the future is suddenly anything but assured. There are a few indications of the time period (Lawrence of Arabia is showing at the movie theater, and Elvis Presley is referenced), but the story feels largely to exist outside of time.

Edgar begins to demonstrate that he is delusional, but the reader is left wondering if that diminishes his artistic eye and ability to create something or is irrelevant to his art. Thomas has always been practical, barely looking past the next moment, and when he enters Edgar's tumultuous universe, he is thrust into dangerous, unexpected situations, yet his desire to explore his own artistic musicality is cemented.

In a near-death experience, Thomas hallucinates an afterlife, encounters his father, and understands the man's true nature. (I wasn't convinced that this experience and the "return to life" that occurs afterward weren't all part of Thomas's post-death consciousness, but I believe that this is supposed to reflect a recovery from almost dying and a fresh start with hopeful new directions indicated for every aspect of Thomas's life.)

This slim story (the book is 176 pages) is eerie and unforgettable.

More from This Author

Benjamin Wood's Seascraper was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

He is also the author of the novels The Bellwether Revivals, The Ecliptic, A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better, and The Young Accomplice.