This is not the first offering from Norfolk publishers Salt to receive a Booker nod – Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse reached the 2012 shortlist. That debut novelist Wyl Menmuir will also feature in the final line-up is harder to envisage, but if The Many doesn’t always convince, it is nevertheless a commendably brave first outing.
The setting is an isolated fishing village, although few fishermen now remain. The sea is full of “biological agents and contaminants”, while the fantastically sinister hulks watching over the bay are haunted by Birds-esque gulls. What the attraction might be for incomer Timothy Buchannan is thus a subject of speculation among the curtain-twitching locals, but it is Timothy’s decision to buy the long-empty cottage of a drowned fisherman, Perran, that causes the biggest stir and proves particularly perturbing for Ethan, Perran’s former skipper.
The relationship between Ethan and Timothy, whose not always distinct perspectives alternate, isn’t easily fathomed, and although italicised chunks of backstory fill in some of the gaps, the manner in which they do so is more functional than elegant. The suspicion that things are about to take a Wicker Man-like turn for the worse is hard to avoid, and while Menmuir invokes depths, it’s very late in the day that they are actually plumbed.
Gradually, the pieces (or some of them) fall into place and, as the plain but insistent sentences do their work, evoking the oppression that Timothy feels, it is one of Sebald’s suffering, psychic-fog bound narrators that springs to mind. (In a particularly Sebaldian touch, Timothy is often unable to read his surroundings, or even printed words.) It would be wrong to give away the precise reasons for his protagonist’s state, but as Menmuir’s allegory becomes decipherable, it is increasingly affecting, and the moment when we understand how the bay and its darkly looming ships might be the warped echo of an earlier, shattering scene is one of great power.
And what of the title? It might refer to the shoals of fish that Timothy’s presence seems miraculously to summon. But the stronger, lingering sense, the one for which Menmuir seems to have been aiming with his unsettling tale, is of Eliot’s crowds on London Bridge, the multitudes undone by death.
The Many is published by Salt (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.37
