Undercurrent
by Barney Norris
The opening chapter of Norris’s fourth (and latest)
novel Undercurrent introduces us to narrator Ed and his fiancée Juliet. They are at a wedding reception when they
suddenly notice that the attractive photographer seems to have taken an uncommon
interest in Ed. Later that night, Ed
discovers that the photographer is Amy, a girl he had saved from drowning when
he was still a ten-year old boy on a family holiday. This unexpected encounter,
and the jolt brought by that half-forgotten childhood memory, is the trigger which
Ed needs to walk out of his relationship with Juliet which, almost without
their noticing, has long gone stale. Ed
builds a bond with Amy and, through her, considers anew his connection with his
parents, and his life plans. The
segments narrated by Ed alternate with chapters in the third person, describing
the chequered history of a farming family in Wales.
This is the not the first novel by Barney Norris which I have read. Some years back, I had enjoyed Turning for Home. That novel had taken as its narrative starting point the "Boston Tapes", an oral history projected about the Irish Troubles, commenced by Boston College in 2001. Against the historical backdrop of the Troubles, Norris waves together two distinct yet related stories: that of Robert Shawcross, a widower and retired civil servant, who was on placement in Belfast at the time of the Enniskellen bombing in 1987, and that of Robert's granddaughter Kate, still nursing emotional and physical scars following a horrific accident.
At first glance, Undercurrent seems to have little to do with Turning for Home. However, as the story progress, I could not help drawing some parallels. Both share the central theme of history and memory, for instance, exploring how the past shapes us and how we in turn shape our past through the stories we tell. Both deal with different layers of “history” – the history of the individual characters, the history of their families, and at a higher level, the backdrop of world events (in this case, the history of Empire and the World Wars).
How far does … history reach into us, control us? Which of us ever really knows whether we’re making our decisions for ourselves, or whether our days are finally shaped by these ghosts? If we knew the whole stories of every family in the world, I think we would discover the secret sources of everyone’s actions. If most of the history of the world wasn’t lost, allowed to vanish because no one wrote it down, we might be able to understand how it came to be what it is now. But the world is too big to ever catch all these stories…
In both novels, I was also struck by the unexpected mixture of the philosophical and the mundane. Some of the dialogue is so ‘everyday’ (small talk while washing the dishes, conversations during long car drives) that it verges perilously on the banal. But, particularly through Ed’s soul-searching narration, Norris also presents us with meditative passages of great beauty and insight, as in this dark description of London with its:
… ceaseless noise, the light, the fear, the anger. In this place we cling to each other and try the best we can to survive the huge indifference of the metropolis all around us… All cities are built like maps of a mind, and when you spend time in them they come to map your own, you can’t help but fall into the rhythms offered up to you…
Life is full of challenges, pain and shattered
dreams. In Undercurrent, Norris
faces these realities head-on, steering a steady course between facile
nihilism on the one hand, and sentimental escapism on the other. The result is
a gently hopeful novel, full of that human/e warmth which we all need.
Hardcover, 272 pages
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