"Sea Change" by Alix Nathan

Sea Change
by Alix Nathan

In The Warlow Experiment, Alix Nathan gave us a historical novel with a difference, one based on a premise would have been incredible, were it not based on documented facts – a scientist conducts a unique experiment in which a man volunteers to live for seven years underground “without seeing a human face”.

Nathan returns with another beautifully executed historical novel, Sea Change, set in England in the early 19^th Century.  This is actually a sequel to the author’s debut novel, The Flight of Sarah Battle, and features some of the earlier book’s characters. 

Although Sea Change may not expect us to suspend our disbelief as much as The Warlow Experiment, Nathan still shows a penchant for the striking, the surprising, the out-of-the-ordinary, albeit grounded in documented history.   The novel starts with a cinematic description of an ascent in a balloon, piloted by “Mr Garnerin, the celebrated aeronaut”.  This is based on an account of an actual flight documented in an entry for 28 June in the 1802 Annual Register.  As she explains in her concluding Author’s Note, Nathan borrows heavily from this report, but inserts her own characters with Mr Garnerin – Joseph Young, a talented artist prone to bouts of depression, and young and beautiful Sarah Battle, operator of Battle’s Coffee Shop and erstwhile partner of the late Tom Cranch, radical activist and publisher.

The flight ends in tragedy. Caught in a storm, the balloon is blown off-course, landing into the North Sea. Joseph and Garnerin are saved, but Sarah is lost.  Her toddler daughter Eve, with her mother presumed dead, is raised as Joseph’s ward.    

Meanwhile, Sarah is brought ashore close to a village off the Norfolk coast and delivered to a local clergyman, the Reverend Snead, renowned for his “fire and brimstone” sermons.  Sarah, voiceless and amnesiac following her trauma, is considered a “saved suicide”, and is soon used and abused by Snead, first as an example for his flock and then as a miracle-working “pure soul”.  As Snead’s religious mania intensifies, fuelled by his inner demons, local doctor Edward, a compassionate believer in humane approaches to psychiatry, provides a ray of hope both for Sarah and for Snead’s suffering wife Hester.   

Alix Nathan combines the two narratives, which move parallelly, sometimes converging in the most unexpected of ways.  The trials of Sarah and Hester on the one hand, and Eve on the other, make for engrossing reading.  Nathan creates a cast of strong and endearing female characters, battling against patriarchal cruelty. This is balanced by the positive portrayal of male figures such as Edward, Eve’s elderly teacher Mr Pyke and the late, absent (but evidently widely admired) Thomas Cranch.

However, in my view, what takes this novel to the next level is the eye for period detail, no doubt backed by detailed researched.  There are some striking set-pieces, including vivid descriptions of London in the grips of radical ideas and the scent of revolution.  The novel expresses the disquiet of the age, expressed for instance through the Luddite movement.   And as a Maltese reader, I could not help being struck by the descriptions of the capital Valletta, which Joseph visits in the first years of British rule.

Sea Change is a colourful novel which portrays the intimate and personal against the backdrop of the larger-scale canvas of societal upheaval.

Published July 8th 2021 by Serpent's Tail

Hardcover, 256 pages

William Turner, Grand Harbour (Valletta) - 1830