This month’s Book Club Choice is The Estuary by Tessa West. I had no choice with this one, sometimes books just jump up and down and say ‘me please’. After my appeal for book titles last month The Estuary was suggested independently by two separate people just before I visited the Arts Festival at Welbourne where Tessa happened to be giving a reading workshop. Then I accidentally came across a copy at home which had been hiding somewhere since being read two years ago.
Tessa has a website at www.tessawest.co.uk and I’m sure she won’t mind if I lift her summary of The Estuary from there.
“RAF officers Susan and Mark and a young ferryman, Robert, steer their different ways through work, friendships, families and aloneness. Susan is trying to focus on her career, while Mark's priority is Susan. The death of Susan's father throws the couple's romantic and family relationships into different perspectives as Robert ploughs on across the river, questioning his feelings about his absent family and his ability to be independent. On January 31st 1953 the disastrous East Coast floods change the shape of the estuary overnight. The ensuing devastation brings new challenges, new opportunities, new decisions.”
It sounds like an attempt at the usual ‘romantic fiction’ by another East Anglian writer but that is far from the truth. Sara Maitland hit the nail on the head when she wrote that The Estuary is a ‘rewarding novel about place…with a real emotional sensitivity in the plot.’ I think ‘emotional sensitivity’ is the key to Tessa’s writing and is paramount in her other novel The Reed Flute which depicts the final journey of an Iraqi grandfather and his grand daughter along the banks of the Yare.
Jeff Taylor
I read the Estuary recently but didn't know of the The Reed Flute? Both books are beautiful evocations of place and time written with a great eye for detail. There were so many instances, particularly in The Estuary, where her descriptions evoked my own memories. There is a section where Robert is sitting on the deck of his boat the Music Maker and Tessa writes that he is conscious of ‘the warmth of Maisie’s body against his bare foot’. Maisie is Roberts dog and those few simple words encapsulate both his own understated love for his constant companion as well as a pleasurable moment in time which I’m sure we have all had. In the same section she describes how closing his eyes beneath the hot sun “the sun makes a hot layer of redness over his closed eyes ….the centre of the redness lightens and little lines appear like the ones on the mudflats upstream at low tide.” Tessa seems able to link what is going on inside people’s heads with what is going on around them in such an easy way. Maybe it’s because there is an element of poetry in many of her descriptive passages. The Estuary has inspired me to go and explore the setting of the book – the river Debden, Bawdsey Manor etc and I will be taking her book with me.
I will unfortunately have to buy a new copy. The copy of the The Estuary I have I found in a local second hand bookshop with a Book Crossing label inside so I feel obliged, even though I paid for it, to let it go back out into the world. The book's ID is 809-1535543. There was a note inside the book which said 'please take this book. It is not lost'.
J Gill
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