20 Books of Summer, #13: Summerwater

King’s tower and queen’s bower,
And weed and reed in the gloom;
And a lost city in Semmerwater,
Deep asleep till Doom.

I read Sarah Moss’s latest novel, Summerwater, in a couple of sittings on a rainy Saturday. It was the perfect way to experience this short, clever novel, which skips between the perspectives of twelve holidaymakers staying on a holiday resort in rural Scotland on a single, torrentially rainy day. Most have been kept up the night before by loud music played by a Ukrainian family, and their hell is now continuing as the weather refuses to relent. Moss’s depiction of this bleak resort is both deeply personal and panoramic. We are completely immersed in the stream-of-consciousness narrative of a young woman trying to have a simultaneous orgasm with her fiancee and being continuously distracted by everything else that’s on her mind, and in the frantic thoughts of a mother who wants to make the most of having an hour to herself while her husband takes the children for a paddle. However, as Moss shifts perspectives, we see how small details that sit in the background of certain narratives, such as a child’s abandoned shoe, take on new meaning in others. There are also short omniscient sections that relate the natural history of this place; as with Jon McGregor’s employment of a similar technique in Reservoir 13, this attempt to connect the human, animal and mineral worlds didn’t work for me, but it only makes up a tiny proportion of the novel.

Summerwater demonstrates Moss’s versatility as a writer; she is equally convincing as an elderly woman suffering memory problems and as a teenage boy getting into trouble in a kayak. Indeed, I thought the two sections narrated by teenagers were two of the strongest in this novel. Moss’s The Tidal Zone proved how good she is at writing about adolescence, and I was pleased to see that carried over when writing as an adolescent. She makes a deliberate choice not to narrate from the perspective of any of the Ukrainian characters; I wondered if, given that they are positioned as a disruptive influence in the resort because of their relentless music, it might have helped to get more from their point of view. But on the other hand, I can see how keeping them silent reinforces some of the other things Moss wants to say about xenophobia, and the stories that others impose on this family (they are intermittently referred to as ‘Poles’, ‘Romanians’ or just ‘Eastern Europeans’, and subtle prejudice threads its way through a number of the characters’ internal monologues).

Summerwater is troubled by something that’s never quite in sight, lending it a tension that carries us through to a thematically ambiguous ending – although there may be clues in the poem that one of the characters half-remembers, ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, which recounts the story of a town drowned beneath a lake because of the unkindness of its richest citizens. As with Ghost Wall, I wasn’t sure that Moss left herself quite enough space to deliver the punch she wanted, and wished that the final scene had been further developed; but the last lines are completely haunting. This is definitely top-tier Moss, and I hope it gets the recognition it deserves (though I feel like I say that every time she publishes something new).

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review. It’s out in the UK on 20th August.