The River [Paperback]

For thirty years the tragedy has rippled outwards like pools in the river, gradually becoming part of the essential fabric of the town. Robert and Isabel continue to live next to each other maintaining an uneasy alliance fraught with sorrow, recrimination, and heartache. "He was responsible, his stupidity his neglect. Not only him - I was equally to blame." Neither have had the courage to let go and perhaps move on from the town and the river where misfortune irrevocably changed their lives.

In 1987, Anna, a young, free-spirited girl wants to leave London so she sticks a pin into the map of Devon and hits upon Cameldip. Seeking refuge for herself and her unborn baby, she arrives and immediately falls in love with the idyllic little township. But in doing so doing she unwittingly seals her fate as she enters the muddy waters of the lives of those who live there.

Taking up Isabel's offer for a place to stay, Anna sleeps in a tree house by Isabel's cottage, a tree house that was originally built by Robert when he first came to the village. As Anna begins to relax into a comfortable and contented life, she phones her boyfriend - who does not know that he is soon to a father - asking if he will drive down from London to stay.

After the child is born, Isabel gradually begins to take them Anna and baby Mathew under her wing. At first everything seems to be going well, but progressively Isabel becomes distracted and starts to confuse past and present and to treat Matthew as her own. She starts to call him Jack, takes him for walks, and lavishes attention on him without Anna's permission. Isabel becomes incensed and even more protective of Mathew, when Anna befriends Josef, a local man, who Isabel partly blames for the accident.

Isabel is a vividly drawn character whose traumas have been papered over, both by her and by the community around her. She's a profoundly disturbed character who treats her anger as a relic, "a fragment that is broken off, displaced but still perfect, which she would unwrap from time to time." Her eventual breakdown, which forms the central theme of the book, is well described, and as gripping as any thriller.

The community is probably equally to blame for closing around her and not reporting her mental state and deterioration. Over the years Robert tried to help, "but he said his lines for so long they were meaningless; what they made were a thread going back to the past." Isabel responds by saying "You wont get away from me you know."

Form and content merge in this tale of many voices, which, like the river, meanders through the years and through the wreckage and refuse of the characters' lives. Scraps of the past are spliced with the present and scenes light up like magnesium flashes on front of one's eyes. Author, Tricia Wastvedt ingeniously incorporates a series of flashbacks, which introduce characters that come to the village and so enter the story.

There's Edward, the kindly local doctor; Constance, the tall grey-haired lady who runs everything in the village; Sarah, a religiously conflicted nurse who comes to look after Edward; and Xavier and Adelie, a French couple who settle in the village quite by chance. The characters are well drawn and totally three-dimensional, with beautifully sketched detail from their daily lives.

The river itself is an important aspect of the novel and swirls its way through the story, sometimes low, broad, slowly moving, offering coolness in the summer heat, but other times moving faster, higher, dragging branches from trees, offering danger in its sheer force. Highly metaphorical, the river follows a serpentine path reflecting the characters' lives; under the surface of their idyllic lives lurk the dangers of the past where events collect like the mud at the bottom of the river.

Many of the characters have been abandoned to cope with their memories. For Robert the beginning and end have been spliced together, "and the years of memory between have fallen away useless." Sarah also remarks that memories are "deceitful treacherous things, a ragbag of delusions and desires."

The River is an impressive, lyrical, and atmospheric novel that is all about memory and how memories weave and slide through time, unwilling to stay where they belong. Like a literary puzzle, the reader must make sense of these memories by placing them in order and into their proper sequence. Only then can we fully grasp the ripple of effects that have resulted from the aftermath of this devastating tragedy. Mike Leonard May 05.