The consolations of nature

Horatio Clare applauds a tough-minded memoir in which a woman follows a river from mouth to source in order to overcome her grief

The Fish Ladder, Katharine Norbury’s memoir and first book, takes nature writing down an intriguing path. The author tells us it is the story of an accidental journey “to the source of this, particular, life”. It seems a near-mystical ambition, but Norbury’s voice is unsentimental and toughminded. She was adopted as a baby, given up by a mother who had had a fling before her marriage. When Norbury says that she had not thought about this much, and adds that her search will take her to “places in the heart that I simply hadn’t imagined could exist”, you believe her. At the outset Norbury is married to a novelist. The couple are living in Barcelona and have a young daughter. But now Norbury loses a second child, a boy whose heart stops beating during her pregnancy. Desolate, she resolves to walk from a river’s mouth to its source “as a coping mechanism”. The consolations of nature have produced masterpieces, from Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure to Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk. The bar is high. At first there seems slender hope that The Fish Ladder will clear it, but part of the book’s charm, and its eventual magic, comes from watching a writer find her voice, and from following a seemingly directionless search as it discovers focus, coalescence, and, eventually, wonder. Norbury embarks on her quest with a series of inconclusive sorties. She heads for the Humber, stumbling on the estuary shore, made nervous by a weirdo and experiencing little epiphanies: “My shadow! I stood between it and the sun, it flooded from my feet along the earth and, for a little while, I knew I was alive.” For much of the book Norbury is shot through with discombobulation, willing the world to give her signs. She meets a hare and wonders if it is her spirit guide. She is acute on the disorientation and spiritual hopefulness that attend our secular age. We come to understand that this is not a book explicitly about the aftermath of a miscarriage, or about a river. Norbury is in search of a salve for the unease that stalks most of us. Instead of signing up for therapy, Norbury demands an answer from the world, and her search gains a quickening rhythm. She is an excellent noticer. A mother with “robust” orange-haired twins “was pale, as if the twins had sucked the goodness from her”. Sometimes when she hits a metaphor the writing sings: “Three fox cubs bounced down the hillside, hot loaves knocked out of their tins.” When a handsome bartender “exuding a butterscotch warmth” makes a pass at her, Norbury describes his body beautifully, hesitates, and writes: “I was aware of the exquisitely finite nature of the moment.” We zigzag between Barcelona, Scotland and Wales, making connections between river myths, salmon stories and folk tales of abandoned children. The search for who she is – who her people might be, what name, nationality and heritage might be hers – becomes more compelling than Norbury’s river wanders, but there is a mysterious pattern at work that keeps hinting at some unifying answer further upstream. Norbury finds the nuns who cared for her when she was first abandoned, in a hospital near the Mersey. Her father dies. She goes mad, and her writing becomes superbly clear and unflinching. She traces her birth mother, who is furious at being found, and Norbury is diagnosed with breast cancer. The ending is reached through twists of emotion that made me cry. The memoirist’s challenge, as I was once told while struggling with one, is simple: “Give a true account of yourself”. The Fish Ladder accomplishes this brilliantly. The vague signs and flickered wonders of its