It’s been a decade since Andrew Michael Hurley won the Costa First Novel Award for The Loney, a moody thriller set on a remote patch of coast in northwest England. He serves up another helping of seaside desolation in his latest novel, set in the fictional estuary town of Saltwash, with its derelict cafes, abandoned bingo hall, and “neglect ... so rife as to seem wilful”.
Our protagonist, the curiously named Tom Shift, is 75 and terminally ill; he has travelled there in the off-season at the request of his charismatic pen-friend, Oliver Keele, who is also dying. Arriving at the hotel, Tom is surprised to discover that Oliver has also invited some other pals – a maudlin gang of elderly men and women, all of whom are weighed down by memories of past woes and misdeeds.
Both men have considerable emotional baggage. Tom, a retired travel writer, is haunted by regret over his handling of a romantic relationship some 45 years earlier, while Oliver, an erudite raconteur who punctuates his conversation with literary quotations, is similarly consumed by guilt relating to the tragic circumstances of his father’s death. But while Tom yearns to connect with his host, to be a good friend to him and thereby achieve some last-minute spiritual redemption, Oliver seems to have given up the ghost; he and the other guests are preoccupied with a mystery raffle, which holds the key to this strange gathering.
We experience Tom’s growing unease through a close third person. He watches one woman, Petula, dancing the jive in a “blonde pudding-bowl haircut” and Mary Quant dress; when she sits down for a breather, her wig is slightly displaced, and he observes a line of melted glue running down past her ear. Her revelry strikes him as false: “it wouldn’t have mattered how many gaudy cocktails she’d put inside her. Guilt was immovable. It remained mud-fast in the mind like the boats stuck on the riverbank here.”
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The hotel itself looms as large as any individual character: Tom marvels at its quaint decor, with its patterned wallpaper, floral carpets and ornate lampshades – “the charm lay not in the furnishings themselves but in the certainty of their sophistication in the minds of the proprietors”.
The garish aesthetics of the backdrop heighten the uncanny sense of estrangement, as does the oddly generic quality of the dialogue. The characters say remarkably bland things like, “He had something of a difficult upbringing, by all accounts.” The third-person narrator also talks in cliches and commonplaces: “The scales had fallen from his eyes”; “still waters and all that”; “in his heart of hearts”; “he’d been very much his mother’s son”; “Being cruel to be kind was sometimes the right thing to do”; “There wasn’t a malicious bone in his body”.
This superabundance of stock phrases would be unforgivable in a literary novel, but their perfunctoriness feels strangely apt here, evoking a sense of eerie hollowness befitting the broken-spirited creatures who populate this tale. In Saltwash, everyone is going through the motions – storyteller included.
Saltwash is best enjoyed as low-stakes entertainment, a winter equivalent to those unsophisticated but diverting summer beach reads. (It is surely no coincidence that the novel’s publication date coincides with Halloween.) Its grisly denouement sets up a melancholy meditation on free will, absolution and the fragility of life. But despite its morbidity, the story carries a sanguine message about embracing the end. Early on, Oliver quotes John Donne: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” The sentiment is echoed by another character, a therapist called Astrid, who believes “no one ever really died ... It was all just a beautiful dance of one vast never-ending energy.”
In the closing pages, Tom reflects on his seaside sojourn: “It seemed unreal now ... His memories of it were unnerving, like the memories of watching an obscene pantomime full of grotesques and buffoons.” That pantomime sounds fun – it’s a shame Hurley doesn’t render it in vivid detail, but only sketches it lightly, as though inviting the reader to imagine a movie along these lines. And yet the faded midcentury world he evokes is so familiar that it can almost be conjured by suggestion alone: the glamour of seaside towns in the days before cheap air travel; the lustre of cabaret entertainers and stage magicians. An entire lost way of life, persisting in the collective psyche. There is surely no better place to wallow in regret, and ponder the transience of all things.
