Book review: The Plankton Collector

Niall Griffiths

The novel The Plankton Collector won the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru Prize in 2018 and has been republished by Parthian this year.

The character The Plankton Collector is…well, what is it? He/she/it is a kind of genius loci, a shape-shifting spirit concocted out of a littoral energy, a vaporous observer and guardian ‘born of a time of greater drama’ and able to take on solid form when required by human need. It is the necessary intermediary between the tiny and the vast: ‘the diatoms of the kingdom Protista, which live in microscopic glass boxes wandering the oceans, release enough oxygen to give all of us now on Earth our every fifty breath’.

We’re ushered into an idyll; an English summer house, a nuclear family gathered on a lawn for tea. There are even croquet hoops. The time is just before ‘Dr Beeching initiated [the] decline’ of the railways. There is an ‘ineffable sadness’ hanging over it all.

Happiness

There is infidelity here. There is the awful death of a child. There are unspoken longings and dissatisfactions and secrets, some that will be divulged and othere that must always be kept. There are memories, individual and collective, pleasing to recall but always coloured with the sorrow of lost happiness.

‘I was happiest before I was married’, the mother of the family thinks, ‘when people called me by my name rather than Mother’. She recalls the death of a dear friend in a road accident. She recalls the day she met the man she would marry, David.

Loss and grief are elements in which human brings live and breathe and this is a world of repressed emotion, of upper lips stiff as boards, all Englishly clipped and formal and foursquare and into it comes The Plankton Collector in the forms of man, kitten, dog, dream, reverie.

He/it/she sends assistance in the form of an Uncle Barnaby who rents a cottage on a nearby island and who shows the children how to make beautiful shimmering pictures out of minute shells.

Vitality of the minuscule 

These tiny shells recur as emblems of the vitality of the minuscule, the interconnectedness of the world’s stuff, and, perhaps most cogently, of beauties that will not declare themselves but are available to the questing and yearning eye, mirrored in the process of human relations: ‘from that day there was a turning…the smallest, microscopic degree of change of an angle, a movement towards one another that was almost imperceptible at first, but palpable to both of them’.

It’s a compelling little book. Although, to this reader, the ending feels a tad forced and also a tad saccharine (this is personal taste, of course), but it’s overall a tender-hearted novella, kind, elegiac, forgiving of human foible and sensitive to the huge sadnesses that are ingredients of every life, beneath the ostensible soundness of their surfaces.

The Plankton Collector by Cath Barton is published by Parthian.