Once Upon a River

Diane Setterfield

Doubleday, £12.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

The river of the title is the Thames, the place is Radcot, near its source in Oxfordshire, and the period is high Victorian. The stage on which events open is the Swan, an historic inn on the banks of the river, whose speciality is not ale or port or gin, but the stories people tell.

Once Upon a River, among many other things, is all about the art of storytelling. Occasionally in her third novel Diane Setterfield breaks out of her invisible cloak of authorship to address the reader directly. It’s as if she’s sharing the joke that since we all know we’re reading fiction, it’s possible to play around with the conventions, making readers feel pleased at their own sophistication in being knowingly beguiled.

In so doing, she effectively has her cake and eats it. We are to recognise that she realises how far-fetched stories like this can seem and yet, to keep us enthralled, she throws into the mix more than a few preposterous red herrings, myths and ghostly appearances. One such is the spectral figure of the long-dead ferryman who appears at moments of need to steer people to safety or “to the other side” when their time has come. Added to these is a chorus of rural rude mechanicals, their witterings intended to leaven an otherwise dark and troubling tale.

Once Upon a River starts at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. If on a winter’s night a traveller... would have been an apt title, had it not already been taken, because into the midst of the drinkers around the fireside in the Swan stumbles a man more dead than alive. In his arms is the body of a drowned child. The local midwife and medical expert Rita is summoned, and after an examination confirms the girl is dead. When nobody is looking, the inn keeper’s son Jonathan, who has Down syndrome, kisses the girl in the hope of awakening her as the prince did with Sleeping Beauty.

And lo, when the nurse returns to the body, instead of a corpse she finds a living four-year-old. Word flies from the inn all around the district and within hours, speculation over the identity of the child reaches a pitch of confusion that Setterfield manages to sustain for the following 400-odd pages. In this she is considerably aided by the fact the girl refuses to speak.

The mystery of the child’s identity is the tow-rope keeping this novel on course. Watery images and allusions abound, and Setterfield writes of the river with pantheistic reverence, as when her noble character Robert Armstrong watches it rushing: “behind the high-pitched ringing of water on shingle at the river edge was a kind of hum, of the kind you would expect to hear inside your ears after a bell has been struck by a hammer and the audible ringing has died away. It had the shape of noise but lacked the sound, a sketch without colour...”

Armstrong, a black farmer, has bottomless reserves of patience and kindness. Illegitimate son of a toff and a servant, he champions the underdog or, for that matter, any animal, being something of a Saint Francis. He married his lame wife, who wears an eyepatch, partly out of compassion. One of her eyes is good, the other can see into people’s souls. Occasionally she will uncover it, stare, and learn the truth of them.

It is in this improbable couple that Setterfield reveals her version of the past, where people are either exceptionally decent, or have extra-sensory powers and profound wisdom, or are unspeakably criminal. One such is the man who we gradually learn has masterminded a child’s abduction. For there are many lost children in this story.

Around the mysterious little girl fished out of the river, and the hunt for a murderer still at large, Setterfield builds a fanciful, detailed, atmospheric torrent of events. Indeed, the novel is so atmospheric it feels at times as if one is scything through the Panamanian jungle, desperate to reach a clearing, or at least a plain sentence. Here, she starts the chapter in which she introduces Helena Vaughan, whose daughter had been kidnapped two years before the story begins:

“A pearl of water formed in the corner of an eye. The eye belonged to a young woman who was lying in the bottom of a boat. The bead of liquid rested in the place where the pink inner of the eyelid swells into the dainty complication of a tear duct. It shivered with the rocking motion of the boat but, supported by the lashes that sprouted beneath and above it, did not break or fall.”

Nothing is ever understated in this book, and nothing is simple, unless it is the inn’s dozy clientele, or the wretched figure of the parson’s housemaid, Lily White, a victim of savage domestic abuse, and far worse. She lies at one end of the spectrum, while at the other is Rita the nurse, unmarried for fear of dying in childbirth as too many of her patients have done. She represents both the world of homespun medicine, before penicillin and surgical intervention, and the emerging scientific age, when facts and rigorous observation offer a fresh understanding. The badly injured man she helps back to health at the inn is a photographer called Henry Daunt who, in the unfailing formula of romantic fiction, falls headlong for his ministering angel. The impediment to true love is not only Rita’s determination never to have children, but also his unhappy marriage.

As Setterfield unreels her story the superstitious outlook of the peasantry collides with reason and rationality. For the purposes of fiction the first is richer in potential, allowing her to revel in the gothic and grotesque.

It will sound harsh, but almost everything about this novel irritated: its laboured and jarring scene-jumping, labyrinthine plot, impossibly heroic and dastardly figures, but above all, its overwrought style. By its end, this was one river cruise I was glad to escape, leaping ashore with relief to find firm land underfoot.