Ben Tufnell, curator, gallery director and essayist with particular expertise in land art, describes his fascination for the “‘slow time’ of painting”. His first novel, The North Shore, might be best understood as an experiment in translating the slow time of painting into fiction. The book loops and meanders through the narrator’s lifelong relationship with his childhood home on the North Norfolk coast, revisiting and reiterating the book’s thematic concerns more in the manner of a musical fugue than a story.
We begin with the young adult narrator left alone in a seaside cottage on the night of a wild and frightening storm. Trees fall, roofs smash, and by the cold light of day the unnamed storyteller goes down to the beach, where he finds what appears to be a body. Even at this dramatic climax, the prose moves slowly: “It then occurred to me that this occurrence – this dead man on the beach – was something I should report … There would surely be some kind of official process.” But the man is not dead, although also not exactly alive, and probably not exactly a man either. The boy takes him home and tries to look after him, but the strange visitor never speaks. He coughs up impossible quantities of seaweed and leaves, smells terrible, turns a funny colour, and then he goes away.
The sinister possibilities don’t develop and most of the book circles reflectively around the unnerving experience remembered in later life. The literary form becomes essayistic, interweaving long interpretations of well-known paintings and ancient Greek literature with accounts of the narrator’s dreams and thoughts about the world. Subheadings appear, out of nowhere in particular: “Mermaids”, “Translations”, “Floods”. The narrator likes thinking about Ovid but has little faith in the reader to do likewise: “Transformations into animals are relatively commonplace in Ovid’s great poem.” (Relative to what?) There’s a lot of instruction: “Botticelli’s La Primavera … is one of the most famous paintings in the world”, though to see the painting, our narrator has to endure Florence being “crowded, way too crowded” with the wrong kind of people: “waves of Japanese tour groups” and “crowds of football fans”. He moves on to describe a vivid dream and some films he once saw. There’s a detailed childhood memory of watching his mother make pastry, which may be an illustration of the fallibility of nostalgia but also suggests that the narrator’s knowledge of Botticelli is balanced by ignorance about baking: pastry requires liquid as well as flour and butter.
The challenge of attempting the translation of visual art into fiction is exactly that of time. Narrative, however experimental, has pace. Sentences put one foot in front of the other, one word and then the next. They describe but also create change. It’s possible to write a still life, but a still life is not a novel, and nor, really, is this book. It’s described as “gothic” and “folkloric”, and the narrator certainly takes a scholarly interest in folklore, but the successful recent novels to which The North Shore invites comparison are much more committed to the building blocks of fiction: plot, character, suspense and resolution. Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent takes its serpent and its romance seriously, Max Porter’s Lanny is fuelled by our need for the missing child to be found, Fiona Mozley’s Elmet is structured around violence and suspense. The folkloric and gothic elements of The North Shore come pre-digested, heralded and flanked by interpretation and explanation. A metafictional element in pastoral gothic isn’t necessarily fatal – Daisy Hildyard pulls it off in Emergency – but Emergency finds its immediacy in thinking about climate change and the indignities of rural poverty.
The North Shore provides a critique of its own curatorial propensities: “Why do I hoard these stories … is it that the tale is a kind of commentary on the artworks and stories? They are … not exactly echoes, for an echo comes after the fact, but more like premonitions.” As a learned collection of commentary and echoes, this book has strengths, but for many readers the narrative voice will be too bluntly didactic to reward reading without a plot.
• The North Shore by Ben Tufnell is published by Fleet (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
