Running deep and dark
Martha lives on the edge of the sea, beneath the looming White Cliffs of Dover, England. But there are not too many blue birds flying overhead in Gillian Best’s weighty debut novel that follows the lives of three women in Martha’s family. Instead the focus lies in the moody darkness of the English Channel, bound by its rocky coastline, with the sting of salt and the bracing chill of its choppy waves forever in the air.
Best is a swimmer and only a swimmer could also describe the Channel’s distinctive soundtrack to those who enter the water there: of pebbles in constant, haunting chatter along the beaches and lining the sea floor.
Martha is a small child in the late-1940s, with a father somewhat damaged by war, while her mother stoically clings to the social niceties of the time and determinedly steers her daughter towards every woman’s fate: marriage, home and hearth and children.
But when Martha falls off the wharf while out with her father fishing and nearly drowns, it begins a lifelong compulsion to swim, not just as a conqueror of the English Channel, but for the salve it brings to her lingering existential crisis.
The novel progresses through her marriage to John, skims over the birth and raising of her two children, Ian and Harriet, then wide-angles into the dramatic and family-splitting discovery of Harriet’s lesbian lifestyle, her marriage to Iris and the birth of their daughter Myrtle.
Myrtle is the second pillar of Martha’s spiritual life. She leaves her clothes under a hardy myrtle bush on the beach, when swimming. John fashioned an engagement ring from a sprig and a bush flourishes from a cutting, in the garden at home.
Harriet’s naming of her child signals her careening throughout a long maternal separation, though it is long embittered years before Martha and Myrtle meet.
In the first, oddly, and the final chapters we live alongside the family through John’s descent into dementia and Martha’s cancer diagnosis, so the heavy and somewhat depressing tone of the novel is struck early.
It’s a compelling saga, literate, sympathetic and insightful but the reader might eventually drown in Martha’s unremittingly dark depths. And a sense of escape might come with the final page. But then strangely, the essence of her story might well linger on afterwards, for days. Martha’s ultimate strength is not easy to dismiss.