The Delicate Shoreline Beckons Us – Jonathan Wood
ZAGAVA MMXIX
My previous reviews of this author here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-new-fate-by-jonathan-wood/ & https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jonathan-wood/ and this publisher here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/zagava/
Pages 15 – 19
Poetic meditation on why this is written in prose — and not in poetry as a form — is not it at all, so why did I write it just now even while I am writing the same sentence that contains the wrong description of what I am reading? Tattoos, skinheads, inner demons, the act of hearing waves outside while being in the London of the small hours, then watching the car windscreen wet up on the way to the seaside within the same sentence of mine that describes him still being in London, still in bed.
I am delighted. This is genuinely THE perfect description of a seaside resort, arrival there for a fortnight’s holiday from the city at the boarding-house etc. I am agog for more but am determined to eke out reading it. I am aging for more, too! I can empathise with the septuagenarians described here.
I, of course, have lived in such a seaside resort for the last 25 years, in fact born in one 71 years ago, and lived there till I was 7.
I now go on short holidays to cities. As defined.
“And in the dream I have, a large gull clambers human-like in through this window..,”
Sorry, this is not really a Pinteresque boarding-house, but more a holiday flat, but it has the potential characters of a new Birthday Party, perhaps. Fried bacon et al. And a pier. You know, this stuff is so good to read for me, I may need to take smaller and smaller bites at it to eke out the dark joy of it.
“I remember way back in the ‘good old days’, those claw machines included packets of Embassy Regal and BHS Special Filter with a metal-strapped watch around it and under the strap was a crisp fiver.”
I am almost having a cerebral orgasm at each observation upon this seaside resort, involving resorts past and present, and including their micro-climates!
“I cannot trust anyone… anymore.”
Even a reviewer who evidently enjoys your work? Well, let me say, this is my favourite Jonathan Wood so far, and that’s saying something! It is both accessible and pungently intellectual, or simply pungent. It flows better than factory-bitter. Better than best bitter, in fact. And the mysterious sounds above his head in his top flat-roofed holiday flat remind me of Aickman hearing a dying horse on his roof, and the pub scenes remind me of the wonderful Stephen Hargadon?
This work already seems to be genuinely unmissable. But, bet none of you have read it!
“The margarine was shocking, the cheapest I could deliberately purchase at the local mini market…”
Wonderful descriptive scenes of culinary masochism, and fish gutting, and the experience of seeing David Dickinson on TV. And we gradually learn more about the narrator and intriguingly why he is now at the seaside, maybe permanently? And I was seriously agape at the vision of On The Buses…
“, sure as eggs are smashed against the wall.”
Sure as eggs are eggs, or sprats are sprats. A ‘sprat’ is made of ‘parts’, like this prose work has parts, a gradual passage through them without noticing they are parts or fragments of some greater gestalt … in synergy with the piles of jigsaws in seaside boarding houses, perhaps one day making a single jigsaw. We gradually, then, sense more to this narrator than originally met the eye, his obsessions, his hinterland of a Pinteresque Birthday Party relationship with this seaside place and its characters heretofore, his need to observe himself as if a doppelgänger, to discover the nature of the noises above his head, the non-Euclidean form of the buildings’ “rooves.” And whether the plural of roof is roofs. As well as Hargadon and Pinter, we have factoring in from Lee Rourke and Brian Aldiss’ Report on Probability A. And ice cream vans today! Butter, not cheap margarine.
“…as if butter wouldn’t melt and turned at the ice cream van…”
“…as if I had seen the Argo emerge from out the classical sea frets. Unmistakeable in its contrasts of speed and deliberate plodding, it was there on the same canvas as the far distant oil tankers…”
This has the feel for me of mutual synergy with Menmuir’s The Many, yet there is something distinct about this Wood book, unique and special against all its other mutual synergies listed in my review. I could not resist reading right to the end in this sitting. I guess that is what they mean by page-turning. It is ultimately so special, it needs to be more famous as a work of fiction, and not skulk away in various unknown seaside resorts. Or even in such wonderfully produced limited editions as this particular physical book certainly is. With its obsessive Process of the Sprat (at first a rabid mix with crab and guppy, later a fly-blown suppuration), a Process of Spirit that you will never forget, plus the ingesting of time, the mutual metaphors of bungalows here and back in the city, my own seaside bungalow included, the contents of freezers, the anxious OCD of switching refrigeration processes on or off, the important disturbing implications of what we find in various cars or boots or freezers, seaside or city, the Surf and Turf, pub belching competitions with On-Naze bikers, those Beckettian others sharing the boarding house, all so brilliantly described in the characteristically matchless texture of Wood prose. “Brown to brown, soil to soil, silt to silt.” “…and pick up the pieces and the fragments…”