Novels set in Cornwall are hardly unusual, swarming like summer emmets across booksellers’ shelves; but good ones which captivate and stimulate the reader, are rareties to be prized. Josephine Gardiner’s new, and debut novel, Whistling Jack, most definitely belongs in this select category. In an imaginative, and skilfully controlled narrative, the events are separated by a hundred and fifty years, but unfold against the same physical backdrop, the meticulously observed Cornish coast, in which-spoiler alert- the town of Trebeere is a thinly disguised version of Penzance. Although anyone living locally will enjoy speculatively identifying other locations, and is clearly in that sense a Cornish novel, it is refreshingly free of the cliches so common to novels about the far west.
Sally, a recent and rather lost recent arrival from London, reads, in a volume borrowed from a local library, the 1821 diary of curate James Prideaux, and is intrigued by his description of an apocalyptic landslip. It is this event, abbreviated to “the Fall”, that creates a playground for Sally and her new, vividly imaginative friends, themselves undergoing another extreme manifestation of nature at its most hostile, the drought of 1976. The Fall cuts a fault line that is geological, moral and emotional, through the lives of the novel’s dramatis personae, rupturing, dividing, and unsettling, and always hinting at the bigger fall that stalks behind so much of our literature and art, the primal loss of innocence. Prideaux, a curate with a secret, becomes obsessed by the fate of his lover’s daughter, Eliza, seemingly inextricably bound up with the seismic shock of the landslip, whilst our 20th century children Sally, Kerenza, Tracy and Victor, discover the body of a young woman in the waves breaking on a secluded, and definitely out of bounds cove.
As the twin narratives unfold, we are struck by the parallels between the ages; both feature unscrupulous landlords, and in both the lives of young women are tragically susceptible to the evils of predatory men. Family names echo through the decades, underlining both the tendency of human history to repeat, and the unvarying nature of small town Cornish society; Mr Jordan greets Sally with the curmudgeonly “more incomers, eh? Just what we don’t need down here”. There’s a sustained, elegiac tone, as ultimately people’s lives, their desires and ambitions, appear of no more significance than the moths which flutter through the narrative and so fascinate Kerenza. Prideaux, alone and outcast in his decaying cottage, remains fascinated by his birth twin, Napoleon, meditating on his ultimate exile and the failure of his revolutionary ambitions. As he muses on the unseen and unremembered lives who have shared what are briefly his four walls and roof, so in the present day our protagonists are quickly subsumed into a Cornwall whose waters close over them inexorably. Cornwall as presented through Sally’s narrative acquires the recognisable trappings of the modern age, its decaying historic hotels, holiday lets and dark, empty winter streets, but its essentials endure: the coastline, the weather, the mythical anthropomorphism of seals, the strangely comforting otherness of moths, and the jellyfish, which, unlike our narrator and her friends, can revert to a sort of childlike state, as an escape from crisis.
The novel reads beautifully: Prideaux’s diary entries offer Gardiner the opportunity to construct a nineteenth century narrative which she clearly relishes. The tone is perfectly sustained, and her sharp ear for the rhythms and cadences of language is shared by his more recent counterparts, who observe the linguistic mediocrity which surrounds them; there’s a wonderful scene where Victor Jordan reacts with incredulity to the numbing bureaucratic management speak of a care home administrator. Prideaux’s description of the landslip, on the other hand, is memorably vivid, “an entire wood uprooted: a broad river of black mud inching downhill…towers of rock…like the Alps in the time of Noah…apple trees growing stoically on…down to the turbid waters.”, and has inevitable resonances for our own age, as climate crisis ravages us with fires and floods.
Murder story, meditation on love and friendship, coming of age novel, social criticism, and certainly eco fable; this is a novel worth anyone’s time this summer.
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