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Review
The Guardian, 23 March 2002
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Customer Reviews
If the backdrop is the scenery of lakes, valleys and mountains, at the foreground is the Lightburn family, mother and father, son and daughter. Janet Lightburn, a headstrong young woman who reaches out beyond the confines of the valley, falls in love with the natural enemy, the architect of the reservoir project. Despite themselves the love grows, secretly at first, and with tragic consequences. All the while, as we become more involved with the characters and the drowning of the past, the valley is being flooded, inch by creeping inch, creating an uncanny and unsettling sense of impending doom.
The writing is majestic and bewitching, laced with poetry while never spilling into melodrama or pretention. You'll love it!
That this is a first novel is amazing enough - that it is written by an author so young makes it doubly so. I had begun to fear that authors like Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru were the best my generation has to offer. Thank God for Sarah Hall who seems to truly understand what literature is about and what it can do - this novel is in the tradition of greats like Thomas Hardy ( the impact of modernity on an unchanging world reminds one of "The Woodlanders") and D.H. Lawrence.
The story builds towards an inevitably unhappy ending but within that there is the kernel of hope, and I particularly liked the way one event in the novel gives rise to a local myth.
The writing is poetic, and on occassion the metaphors can be a little off the mark, but these flaws are few and do not detract from a marvelous book that deserves to be widely read. I shall look forward to the author's next work.
I will not recap the plot, as the first review posted here does that nicely. I will say though that the descriptive quality that this work has took my breath away because I am deeply familiar with these hills, and have walked/climbed Helvellyn and many others; and this writing made me feel at home though I read most of the book in India. I would in fact defy anyone to compose a more atmospheric rendering of the region and the people, especially the hard edge and 'just get on with it' attitude of Cumbrians even today. The language of this book captures the entire thing, including the dialect, which is done in a way understandable to all. The detail is equally incredible, and I almost could not believe that this was written by a modern-day Cumbrian, and not someone who was there at the time.
At the end, I knew that the people portrayed were not real, but I was left with the very distinct impression that they must have been awfully like the people who actually went through losing their village in this way. This really DID happen, and it just makes this whole chapter of history very real and immediate to me, especially after hearing my 96 year old grandmother say 'that's manchester's water, you know' every time we pass the lake, and never really having thought much about it before.
Ms. Hall has a bright future ahead of her, if she continues to use the same awsome creativity and the same skill at painting such a real picture as she has done in this work.
But if I had looked at reviews and seen the frequent likemesses to Wuthering Heights - a... Read more
Loving the Lake District, Wast Water in particular, I was attracted to this first novel after a friend's recommendation. Read more
Sarah portrays the characters and environment in a majestic fashion. Read more
I'm very ansious waiting for the next book.
The author does a magnificent job of rendering this local landscape into the printed word, and paints characters... Read more
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