Book review: Fall River by Meredith Miller

Niall Griffiths

Well, this is an opening: 2016. Second person address to an observer.

We’re being invited to watch Alice walk into the river Tamar and to observe Khadija sleep on a train, returning to Cornwall from London. The train crosses over a bridge, beneath which flows the river: “blank…and pretending it would float you…Khadija knows the muddy bottom underneath, waiting to hold your ankles…Mud two metres deep, made of rotting grass from up the valley, pesticides carried downstream, animal guts and blood hardened into the iron on the bridges.”

This is fine writing, exhibiting an instinctive appreciation of how to unobtrusively offer a localised history and introduce the cast.

The mood is both urgent and melancholy. Here’s Tammy Williams, Khadija’s auntie, springing from the page. And the sluggish, infected and infecting Tamar, knitting it all together, Conradesque in its background currents. This is an impressive, lyrical, rich and promising opening section. A lot is going on, and the observer eagerly accepts the invitation to witness it unfold.

Small talk

Does the rest of the novel live up to this opening? Well, yes and no; mostly, it must be said, no. It’s far too long; the pacing is painfully awry; the cast is too big; and the dialogue, oh the dialogue…the small talk, the over-sharing of trivialities, the undifferentiated pages of clumsy explication. Verisimilitude is one thing; constant and simply functional long-windedness is something quite else. All of these shortcomings can be overcome and even, indeed, capsized into strengths – I’m thinking of Alan Warner, say, whose long chapters somehow grip and engross, or Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, whose recorded small talk between the novel’s two sisters is deceptive, and a thin scrim for a seething teem of emotion. But, alas, that’s not done in Fall River.

This is doubly regrettable because the descriptive writing can be beautiful, the character of Saltash itself is intriguing, and the background unstoppable rush of the river, and its influence on the character’s lives, is deftly and powerfully done. There’s familial conflict, intrigue, and a past suicide throwing ghosts into the present. Tammy is attuned to some adjacent realm (this ‘gift’ passed onto Alice), some neighbouring actuality, the dispatches from which are delivered in a kind of crazed and suggestive poetry. These are all good things. But the web of connection takes far too long to spin and Miller does not know who is its architect and the conversational threads break and drift and dangle uselessly.

Knowledge

Germane-ness is important, as is the knowledge of when to use the diegetic and the commentative: for example, ‘Tammy asks Alice how she’s feeling’ removes the need for recorded query with its littering of the page with punctuation and the inescapable hint of the unconvincing (in novels, people talk at, not to, each other). The attention inevitably roams. It’s frustrating and it smithereens the plot. We jump between 2014 and 2016 and there are lots of people going into rivers and characters drifting pointlessly and briefly across the timelines and I frequently lost track of what was going on.

Wasteful

Again, this seems wasteful; there’s a character called Charlie/Charlotte who ‘grew into decorous cruelty’; this is a superb phrase, but who the heck is Charlie/Charlotte? They appear briefly and without any real significance to the plot. And Alice, after a suicide attempt by drowning does not succeed, is rescued by a kind of commune of drug users and dropouts but this flits across the reader’s perception like a sparrow across a window (and, I must add, the scene of Alice walking into the river, and the fervid world inside her head as she does so, is thrillingly written; but it’s undermined and diluted by what frames it). I found myself giving up a sigh whenever a new character was introduced. I gave up a lot of sighs.

The disconnect carries over even into the acknowledgements; of course, it’s right to point out the rates of asbestosis and mesothelioma in the Plymouth dockyards and the typical establishment disregard of these horrors, but how on earth is this relevant to the book? If such things are mentioned in the text, I must have blinked and missed it.

Underneath all the packing, there’s a good novel here. And Miller can certainly write. The core, the heartwood of it, is alluring and fertile for novelistic exploration. But, Jeez, please…edit. Edit edit edit. Red-ink out all of the detritus and stuff that chokes the flow of this book.

Fall River by Meredith Miller is published by Honno. It is available from all good bookshops.