Book review: Searching for a reason amid the gloom

'Saltwash' skilfully blends the themes of decay both personal and general with a ticking tension over an impending game which turns out to have high stakes 

Andrew Michael Hurley’s books have been rooted in the gnarly traditions of English folk horror. Picture: Hal Shinnie

• Saltwash 
• Andrew Michael Hurley 
• John Murray, €16.99 

On a bleak November afternoon, an elderly man steps from a train and walks towards a grim Lancastrian seaside town. 

Saltwash was once a booming summer retreat famed for its healing waters, but its glory days are well behind it, and as Tom Shift approaches the promenade, his spirits sink.

‘An estuary was what they had here,’ he tells us, ‘and at low tide it had been suckled down to a delta of dark streams and vast sandbanks that stretched a mile or so to the opposite shore where a lighthouse and a few white cottages sat by a line of stunted, wind-striken pines.’ 

Saltwash is a gloomy spot alright, and as he nears the Castle Hotel, Tom notes that ‘with the day waning, the gulls flocked inland and gathered on the roof of the concrete wind shelter opposite, scooping out the air with their cries’.

The gathering night is full of omens, which makes Tom wonder why on earth he arranged to come here to meet his new pen pal, Oliver Keele. 

Tom has a brain tumour that will sooner or later kill him, and through a support group has begun corresponding with Oliver, a genial man similarly afflicted who masks his fear with jaunty missives peppered with painfully apt quotes from Shakespeare, Dryden, etc.

Though he’s never met him, Tom has come to care for Oliver, and gathers from his ever changing address that the poor man must lead a precarious life.

Oliver has asked Tom to meet him at the hotel, where Tom plans to give him money. 

But when he arrives there’s no sign of Oliver, and instead Tom is drawn into a strange geriatric gathering built around a meal, and some kind of raffle. 

As one tipsy female forces him to dance, and another tends to her dementia-stricken husband, Tom becomes intrigued about this impending game everyone’s so worked up about.

Most of these doddering guests come back every year in the hope of winning, and the hotel walls bear framed photographs of ecstatic former winners. 

When Oliver turns up all will be revealed, but meanwhile Tom is hoping that his ex-wife Angeline will find it in her heart to forgive him.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s previous books have been rooted in the gnarly traditions of English folk horror, and while there’s a touch of MR James about Saltwash, it reminded me more of one of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. 

Making a 75-year-old terminally ill man your protagonist is a brave move, more so when he isn’t especially likeable, and Tom’s efforts to focus on the here and now are compromised by floods of memories and possible interference from the growth in his head.

Mr Hurley uses nature and architecture to construct an atmosphere at once foreboding and banal, and while his rhythm stutters somewhat early on, he has a wonderful grasp of what he calls ‘English dilapidation’. 

He has a great ear for dialogue too, and is not afraid to indulge the little England outbursts of his fulminating pensioners.

His descriptions of the couple Victor and Connie are particularly good. 

Confined to a wheelchair, Victor has lost his reason, and all continence, his life reduced to ‘a series of passing spectacles’. 

Connie fusses over him cheerfully, cleaning up his messes, but ‘that smile of hers was a labour to maintain — behind it was the tumult of every emotion but happiness’.

Saltwash skilfully blends the themes of decay both personal and general with a ticking tension over the impending game, which turns out to have high stakes indeed. 

I wondered at one point if this fine book might be a metaphor for the decline of post-Brexit Britain, but perhaps that was just me.