Ebbs and flows of gripping river tale
Courtney Gallery Book Group
THE group enjoyed reading Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield.
The novel is an atmospheric tale that entwines folklore and myth with the everyday lives of the characters.
The River Thames “winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions”, and this journey is reflected in the story itself as it has three plot tributaries of its own.
The novel has a dramatic start that electrifies the regulars at the Swan, a riverside inn in Oxfordshire which is renowned for its storytellers.
On the evening of the winter solstice in the 19th Century, a drenched man with a damaged face bursts through the door with the corpse of a little girl.
But Rita, the local nurse and midwife, notices that despite the odds the girl revives.
The girl was found floating in the river but doesn’t speak. Three of the locals believe they have a claim to the child.
A farmer believes her to be his granddaughter, a landowner believes her to be his daughter who was kidnapped when two years old, and the village parson’s housekeeper who believes the girl is her lost sister.
The story slowly develops around the claims of these three characters. The reader is confronted with a series of questions, who is the little girl and how did she end up in the river, and who will get to keep her?
For some of the group, the story started as a slow burn with perhaps too many stories, details and characters. But everyone enjoyed the story telling theme and the way the story ebbs and flows like the river.
The tradition of story telling was discussed, of how individuals bring their own slant to a story, how it changes with every telling, and how observation and perception can be very different, even when viewing the same event.
The characters have a Dickensian feel, although Rita was viewed as a more modern woman.
Science was a theme throughout the book as well the need to protect and ‘own’ the child.
The next book to be discussed will be ‘I Capture the Castle’ by Dodie Smith.