Alex Preston’s fourth novel sprang from the notion of crafting a “grown-up” Moonfleet, he explains in his acknowledgments, adding “I hope this is close”. For anyone who’s familiar with J Meade Falkner’s swashbuckling 1898 tale of smuggling and shipwreck, the answer is a boisterous yes, but readers for whom that evocative title draws a blank need know only this: you’re in for a treat. Its short, salty chapters are crammed with murder, treason and illicit embraces, with chases, battles and perilous high-seas skulduggery. There is international espionage, a whisper of witchcraft, and a cast of orphans, rogues and redcoats. There are, should you still need persuading, maps.
Winchelsea takes its title from its East Sussex setting, a crumbling town whose heyday is long passed. It opens there in 1742, when heroine Goody is barely 16 years old. Saved from drowning as a babe, she is the adopted daughter of a French herbalist and one Ezekiel Brown, a local who straddles two worlds, being both physician and – like all Browns before him – “cellarman”, allowing smugglers known as the Mayfield gang to stow their spoils in the maze of tunnels that run from his home, Paradise, down beneath the streets and out to the seashore.
But Ezekiel is also a Catholic, and he’s been diverting profits to the Jacobite cause – reckless behaviour that soon leaves Goody running the operation. She seeks out her older brother Francis – also adopted, and Winchelsea’s first dark-skinned resident, having escaped from a slave ship as a boy. Together, they become smugglers, aligning themselves with the rival Hawkhurst gang to avenge Ezekiel’s death. They continue, also, to send funds to “the king over the water”, AKA Charles Stuart.
While there is incident aplenty in Goody’s passage from untested child to storied adult, there are insights, too. Preston, a critic for these pages, muses as ably on fatherhood as on what a person’s heart does in the moment before they fire a fatal shot, and through his patchwork narrative (most of Goody’s story is “filtered” through the pen of another) plays with notions of literary ownership and authenticity.
Although convincingly anchored in the 18th century, Winchelsea remains, too, a product of its own time. Goody sees how uneasy Francis is, for instance, watching morris men caper in blackface, and she is also an outsider, feeling most comfortable “neither as woman nor man, but in the space in between”.
Note, too, her name: for all the cinematic gore that spills from these pages (a threat such as “give us one mote of trouble, we’ll wring your liver” is meant only in the most literal sense), notions of right and wrong aren’t entirely cast aside.
What holds the novel together as much as its driving plot are its incantatory atmosphere and spellbinding language. Nights are noisy with owls and fieldfares, “their lonely twits falling down through the dark”, while meaning oozes via sound and rhythm from antique vocabulary such as “fallalery” and “yelloching”.
Winchelsea closes in the way of all truly cracking yarns: with the tantalising promise that there might just be more adventures to come.
• Winchelsea by Alex Preston is published by Canongate (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
