She can still do poetry. Deep asleep, deep asleep, Deep asleep it lies, The still lake of Summerwater Under the still skies. Herself in little white socks and the dress her mother made, real Liberty lawn with red berries on it, stepping forward on the stage and seeing her parents in the middle of the front row, smiling, Dad mouthing along with her, Mum in that hat. No, Semmerwater not summerwater, took her ages to remember to say it right, Dad listening to her every night when he came back from work, and here she is getting it wrong again sixty years later. Or sixty-five.
Gosh, this has taken me too long to get to writing this review (#thanks2020), so while the details aren’t entirely fresh, Summerwater lingers in the memory as a quite enjoyable read. The title (and the opening quote) reference the poem Semmerwater by Sir William Watson (in which a land is cursed and destroyed by flood after its king and queen refuse charity to a beggar), and by giving us glimpses into minds of twelve cottagers in a rain-soaked Scottish holiday camp, author Sarah Moss subtly makes commentary on Brexit, climate change, and domestic relationships, asking: are we humans simply incapable of charity and therefore deserving of the briny depths Deep asleep till Doom? There is plenty of nice nature writing here, interesting interactions seen from contrasting POVs, and while the plot felt light (until it became overwrought), viewed as an allegory, I was more than satisfied in the end. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Leap a puddle, easier now, wet feet won’t matter later, once they’re warm, and here it is, the shift, the running element, like getting into a lake and at first your body says what are you doing, this water is icy, these are boobs, they’re meant to be warm, but you keep going, you swim, you push and glide, belly and lungs floating the way they did before you were born and it’s not cold, not once you get used to it. It’s like that, running, after the first mile. Your body knows how.
Summerwater is set on the longest day of the year and starts from the POV of Justine — a Mom and wife who has become obsessed with running and fitness, waking at 5 am while on holiday to jog in the pouring rain before her boys wake and clamour for their breakfasts — and as she runs, her thoughts rake over all the small resentments of her marriage (He won’t even sit down to pee now he’s started getting up in the middle of the night, would rather wake her pissing like a horse than sit like a woman just the once.), and while I suppose readers are meant to identify with any character whose mind we’re visiting, Justine doesn’t seem entirely reasonable or likeable — and I found that to be an interesting place to begin. As she runs, Justine thinks passingly about the old couple in the cabin next door, and then the next chapter is from that old man’s POV — in which he not only has a chapter-length stream-of-consciousness overview of his own life and marriage but has uncharitable thoughts about Justine as she runs by in just her sports bra after taking off her sodden shirt — and so the book proceeds: jumping from this character to that, often the second partner in a couple reframing what the first was thinking about in an earlier chapter, and it’s not so much that any character is actually an unreliable narrator but that each of them has trouble seeing beyond their own narrow experience. (My favourite chapters involved these married [or soon-to-be married] characters and many well-observed moments, but I will note that I was less interested in the POVs of angry teenagers and young children.) And while familiarity may breed contempt and the pressure ratchets up as families are shut indoors together while the rains bucket down outside, these proud Scots are unified in their contempt for that one Eastern European family that kept everyone up the night before with their loud music: Are they from somewhere where people yell and scream like baboons all night and keep the babies and old people awake? And weren’t they supposed to have left the country by now anyway? Isn’t that what the vote was about?
The sky has turned a yellowish shade of grey, the colour of bandages, or thickened skin on old white feet. Rain simmers in puddles. Trees drip. Grass lies low, some of it beginning to drown in pooling water, because even here, even where the aquifers are in constant use and the landscape carved by the rain for its own purposes, the earth cannot hold so much water in one day. Under the hedges, in the hollows of tall trees, birds droop and wilt, grounded, waiting. Small creatures in their burrows nose the air and stay hungry. There will be deaths by morning.
At the beginning of each chapter is a small passage describing how the unrelenting rain is affecting the land and animals; the deluge seems unnatural and threatening and ultimately human-caused. This sense of “there will be deaths by morning” looms over everything: The peregrine will starve if she can’t take to the air but the rains would drag her down if she tried. Just who is that man dressed in camo lurking in the woods? And why is there a girl’s patent leather shoe abandoned on the lakeshore? There are many warnings that a tragedy is coming but we humans aren’t very good at reading those signs.
I did very much like this view into Scottish life: I live in a northern country, but I was surprised to learn just how long their summer solstice is (even in a day that saw no actual sunshine). I was also surprised to read about the children being sent out to play in pouring rain in their splash suits (which I think would make me miserable, but do others think we Canadians are miserable when bundled up to play in the snow and cold? Because we’re not.) I was amused when one character winced as his fiance used the phrase “jolly good” (Just so long as she doesn’t say it to his mum. Or in the hearing of pretty much anyone in his family.), as that was the first I realised she must be English and the first I’ve ever considered that an English daughter-in-law would be deemed “foreign” in a Scottish family. Moss paints a very vivid picture of the Scottish experience (within and without human consciousness), and while pride and history and tradition bind these cottagers into a like-minded community, a tendency towards uncharitableness towards “others” (whether the foreign-born or the nonhuman environment) seems destined to doom Scotland (and us all) to Semmerwater’s unhappy fate. I liked the line-by-line writing here quite a bit and the overall picture gives much to think about.
