“Twenty years on there seemed much more of this world behind me than in front of me. I wandered a crumbling landscape busy with ghosts, where every object spoke of what had passed and all lines led back into history.”
When we consider different modes of writing, we probably have a number of preconceived rules in our heads: an autobiography has to contain a certain amount of personal information, a history has to be based firmly in verifiable fact, and so on. Whilst these kinds of definitions clearly have their usefulness, sometimes the best writing jolts us out of this kind of glib acceptance and makes us reconsider what we’re being told, and how we’re being told it. This brings me to a very unusual piece of writing – The Stone Tide, a book which encompasses several genres from travel guide to confessional with many more besides, and does so to intriguing, thought-provoking and deeply moving effect.
The book starts with a house move from London to Hastings – a quaint seaside resort in England, where the author and his wife (and two children) have purchased a ‘fixer-upper’, one of those houses where the point between moving in and ‘finished’ ever recedes into the distance. This house, with all of its decades of unharvested nooks and life stories, takes on an almost sentient role in the early chapters of the The Stone Tide, always with an ace up the sleeve to unpick hard work or destabilise its new inmates, in ways which reach towards the supernatural on several occasions, though you come to understand early on that any retelling of these events is often enmeshed with mordant flights of fancy, coming to the page in anything but a straightforward way. The author soon seeks solace away from these four walls by taking the sea air – but in doing so, prompts a flood of painful memories of the loss of a friend, Mike, some twenty years previously.
Suddenly finding himself thinking again about this loss, coming at a point when the day-to-day is growing increasingly testing, and when there’s another book – but what kind of book? – to be written, forms the backbone of this novel. This is not one story, but rather a very broad array of intermingled stories; within these, factual start-points give way to imaginative leaps, with conversations embellished or invented, and mundane concerns spliced with fantastical additions. At the heart of all of this is Hastings itself, which receives a hauntological treatment along the way: for a small seaside place, it has a surprisingly chequered history, and once became a kind of impromptu hotbed for British occultism.
Amongst other things, it was the last residence of the infamous ‘Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley, a character for whom death hasn’t been much of an impediment to his notoriety, and the last years of Crowley’s life are often significant in The Stone Tide. Other notorious Hastings alumni crop up too, until we have a small gathering of notables being invoked and repositioned as characters in the narrative, interrogating one another as well as asking profound questions about time and loss. A number of deeply engaging, winsome skits on local history – such as the story of Hannah Weller – are also added. This provides a rich, expansive overall effect, one which seems to sprawl in places, but comes together seamlessly, revealing a complex structure and not just breadth of information. Added to this imaginative set of histories are various flights of fancy which had followed the author since childhood: now that he has been reminded of something devastating from his youth, lots of the old monsters-under-the-bed (or at least, giant sofa-headed eels which have lain dormant) are re-emerging. The ridiculous and the sublime are often together in this book. Where else would Edward I and Rod Hull ever find themselves in conversation? And yet, somehow, within this genre-rules free zone, it all makes a kind of ad hoc perfect sense.
All of this is refracted through Rees himself of course, in candid and self-deprecating fashion which weaves throughout the book. It’s hard, on reflection, to imagine another writer being able to weave all of these separate elements into one place in this way. The prose is rich and evocative, but Rees retains a conversational tone which is very disarming, and although what he is considering at length here can weigh very heavily there are frequent pinpricks of humour – even when things are taking a very bleak turn indeed, as they often do here. This kind of combination of observation and introspection makes parts of the book feel like one of those pub conversations where you almost peer into a profound truth which you know you can’t quite grasp, and which so many others have failed to quite-grasp before you. I’ll admit, parts of the book really got under my skin and made me feel very sad, but then other aspects of it are so sardonically funny that perhaps all you can do is laugh in the end.
An ingenious meld of fact, fiction and various unrealities, The Stone Tide is a bold and inventive read, incredibly imaginative and poignant. Fantastical it may be and may be often, but at its core it’s an ardently honest book and I thoroughly reading enjoyed it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it.
The Stone Tide: Adventures at the End of the World by Gareth E. Rees is available via Influx Press. Rees also curates a website of potential interest: Unofficial Britain, which you can check out here.