Rural flotsam

Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy.

Notwithstanding’s suite of inter- linked stories draws on Louis de Bernière’s memories of the Surrey village (somewhere near Godalming, you infer) where he lived as a boy. Having read the first piece, ‘Archie and the Birds’, about a cheery forty-something bachelor living with his mother who communicates with her by way of a walkie-talkie, and grimly despatched the third, ‘Archie and the Woman’, in which our man marries a fellow dog-walker, I was about to write the whole thing off as an exercise in the higher whimsy when I came across a fourth, and much longer, piece called ‘The Girt Pike.’

Here an 11-year-old boy named Robert, local accent not yet borne away on the Estuarine tide, brings in a yard-long monster that has spent years chewing up the ducklings in Mrs Rendall’s pond. Meticulously done, full of near-incomprehensible Compleat Angler jargon (‘Use the half-blood knot as usual, but wet the line first or it’ll be hard to draw tight’ etc), it ends up just on the right side of sentimentality by virtue of its determinism. Cheery Mrs Rendall ‘one day soon, would be carried away by cancer before she was 40’, while Mr Horne, the obliging tackle-shop proprietor, will end up dead on the railway line, exhausted by years of caring for his mentally ill wife.

The scent of prior knowledge that hangs over the clutch of stories covering the deaths of the village’s original inhabitants gives them a fine, Hardy-esque, dying fall — literally in several cases. We know what is going to happen in ‘The Death of Miss Agatha Feakes’, an ageing spinster who lives only for her pets and whose visitors shun her cat-impregnated teacups, but this doesn’t make her eventual tumble amongst the animal trays (‘She smells newsprint, mud, Kittykat and Chappie, and closes her eyes in agony and resignation’) any less eerie.