The Tidewater Tales [Paperback]

John Barth's novel is the kind of book that draws you into itself, pulling you into a narrative journey that allows you to grow and change along with the characters in the novel. Drawing on his vast knowledge of frametale literature and his four favourite intertexts ("The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "The Tale of the Thousand Nights and a Night", "The Odyssey", and "Don Quixote"), Barth creates and constructs a multi-layered tale of writing, reading, storytelling, and the love and delight of life and narrative. Peter Sagamore, once a writer of expansive novels, now a writer cramped by microminimalism, asks his eight and a half month pregnant wife, Katherine Shorter Sherrit Sagamore, to set him a task, so she asks him to take her sailing. They set out in their engineless yacht, named "Story", for a day's sailing on the Chesapeake Bay, and are swept away from home by the first of twin storms, Blam! and Blooey!, that hold the narrative and the novel, and the characters, between them. During two weeks of sailing "wither the wind listeth" around the Bay, this sexy, dreamy, lovely couple, very much in love, tell the stories of their lives, trying to find a way to solve Peter's writerly woes. Readers of John Barth will recognise the time and place of this novel, and some of the slightly renamed characters, from his earlier novel "Sabbatical: A Romance". This concurrence allows for a fecund play of revision and rewriting which are themselves themes of the novel: all the writers and readers and storytellers in the novel, including Odysseus, Don Quixote and Scheherezade, are in some sort of narrative pickle, and need their fellows to experiment with them to try and overcome their dilemma. Written from a dual and conjoined narrative perspective of both Peter and Katherine Sagamore, the narrators play with time and tense, anticipating things they will consciously write into the story, and other such narrative tricks. This playfulness is apparent and delightul throughout the novel, and does much to make the reader smile much of the time, but never drowns the real drama of the personal journey the characters are going through, Peter's threadbare writing and Kath's enormous pregnancy, their doubts about bringing children (probably twins) into the world, and their marriage. More than anything, this is a novel about the world of love, and how to live in it, and that is the story that Peter and Katherine tell together.

Peter is a working class successful writer who has become blocked and so begs his well heeled wife (Katherine) who is 8 ½ months pregnant to set him a task. She does which is to tell stories as they sail around the Chesapeake Bay (a 200 mile long estuary on the Virginia and Maryland coastlines) in their boat called Story. During of which we discover how they fell in love in the 60's but not met up until the 70's and why they are having babies now as they hit 40. But this is only one of three other love stories in the novel. One is the love of landscape and the other is of sailing. Both of which are powerfully evoked throughout the novel. Their love story, landscape and sailing are then effectively linked to their families. Hers being local old money who have shaped the land since before the USA was founded and his being boat builders who have shaped access to the water since coming over in the 19th century.

Katherine's family are open, generous friendly and sophisticated so accept and support the whims of Peter and Katherine to sail around the Bay. Likewise Peter shy and intense and Katherine open and bright are deep friends and in love so we like the characters and join in the physicality evoked by the writing. However these are but three of several strands in the novel, two others are a political thriller and an eco-mystery. The first explores the CIA-KGB spy games as the SALT talks dirty tricks play out in the local area. The second looks at the environmental damage being done by illegal dumping. Both story lines are linked firmly with Katharine's ex husband and her charming but wastrel brother but not as you expect.

But all this are themes for the real focus of the novel which is about the art and mystery of writing and story telling. So over the 14 days of sailing we move in and out of the stories of Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, 1001 nights of Arabian Tales, Odyssey as they shape and are shaped by the love story landscape and sailing. We meet the narrators as characters finishing their own stories and shaping the novel as we do as reader-characters. This means that the narrative moves through a whole range of formats (plays, short essays, monologues, puns, wordplay etc) and genres (love story, social comedy, thriller, family saga, etc) with us and the unborn babies as narrator commentators along with the characters who know they are in a story. And we know their fates outside the story itself.

Don't expect a quick read as its 655 pages and small print but do expect an intellectual tour de force and a page turner for what is mediation on writing that races along driven by the reader's identification with Peter's writers block, and their immediate parenthood while the multi-layer story entertains and stretches. Clearly a banquet that lingers in the memory when many beans on toast novels have been long forgotten so highly recommended.