The plot is as deep and dark as it gets, multi-layered with 'who knew what when?' as the strands come together and the finer details get filled in. This is an absolutely compelling, gripping book full of mystery and suspense. Only a few authors can write deeply involving psychological drama of the very highest quality.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

3.5/5.

This is Ben Tufnell’s debut novel but not his first publication. Tufnell was a curator at Tate, Director of Exhibitions at Haunch of Venison and is a founding Director of Parafin, an independent gallery in London. He has a particular interest in land art, art that engages with landscape and nature. I was not aware of Tufnell before coming across this book but I was immediately drawn to this biographical detail perhaps because I am a keen photographer who focuses (pun intended although a lot of my photos are deliberately blurred) on nature.

I have to say that this book was, for all that, not what I expected from reading the blurb. When you read the book’s description, you read about ferocious storms along the Norfolk coast and a young man making a startling discovery on the beach in the aftermath. This thought is just the start of the book and is very much a portal into something much more expansive. The details you read are one thread of the book, but in another, much longer, thread, we meet the main character again as a much older person and this part of the book, which interleaves with the original part until it takes over completely, takes the form almost of notes or research into ideas about metamorphoses, about connectivity, about how mythology, especially myths of humans being transformed into plants, is a way to understand the strangeness of the real world. Here in this second part of the narrative, we have an older man looking back (hence the blurb references to “coming of age”, I think) and coming to terms with the fact that his memories often don[t quite seem to match his discoveries about the past.

And this idea that the second thread of the book gradually takes over the first thread fits very much with this theme of metamorphosis: this is a book that transforms itself gradually as you read it from one thing at the start to a completely different thing at the end.

It is completely coincidental, but immediately prior to reading this book, I read a novel by Siri Hustvedt. I mention this because both Tufnell and Hustvedt write about art. Also, and this isn’t really relevant, both Tufnell and the Hustvedt book I read include a young woman who wants to be an actor and waits tables at a cafe (she’s the main character in the Hustvedt book and just a cameo in this one). For Tufnell, the works of art he uses are starting points for meditations about human transformations. He casts his net a lot wider, though, and draws on lots of other ideas. Perhaps most obviously for his theme he references Ovid frequently. He also draws on old science fiction movies and on his narrator’s (or perhaps just “his”) family history among lots of other things that swirl around and cross-reference one another.

I have to say I found it a completely engaging book to read and I read it all in a day. I can imagine that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea because it doesn’t flow or have a plot. Well, it does flow: it flows round and round in circles as it picks up ideas and, to change metaphor, knits them together.

I really liked it.

(Review to be posted to Goodreads when the book has been created there).

I ended up not finishing this one. The beginning was intriguing, but then it got way too smart for me. I love art as much as the next gal, but gosh was I bored. All I wanted to do was get back to the puking seaweed man.