Review

Seizure

By Erica Wagner

Published by Faber

Janet Ward has always believed that the mother she never knew had been knocked down and killed by a drunken driver.

She is therefore shocked when a solicitor rings to inform her that her mother has recently passed away and bequeathed to Janet a small property. Janet decides to travel north to visit her inheritance, leaving behind the dependable Stephen, whose concerns for her safety she brushes aside.

Her journey brings her eventually to The Shieling, a tiny stone cottage by the sea. When Janet lets herself in, she discovers that the property is far from the wreck she imagined; rather, its spare but neat furnishings indicate that someone is already living there.

The lone resident is a sandy-haired man named Tom, about Janet’s age. He lives a spartan, sparse and solitary life, fixing up cars and reminiscing about his storytelling mother, who restlessly moved the two of them from place to place. Returning to the cottage, Tom is surprised to see a woman closing the door with an exact replica of his key. After watching her for a while, he confronts her.

Janet’s fierce animosity towards the stubborn, calm Tom is transformed into a desire almost beyond her control. More than once, she loses herself in one of the seizures that afflict her from time to time: ‘I am vaporized metal, electricity, air … I could be a bright hot gas flame with all of my senses burnt away by fear, burnt away by myself.’

This elemental imagery mirrors the raw and almost primitive strength of feeling between Tom and Janet: the shuddering cold of the waves and the cottage’s stone floor, the cold that Tom feels ‘at the back of his neck blowing sweet, light: freezing too’, but also the ‘spit and click’ of fire in the grate, and the hot blood that pours from a wound or seeps through a gauze dressing.

Wagner sustains this intensity of feeling with some beautifully descriptive and poetic writing. Such vivid prose draws us into Tom and Janet’s story, which is for them at once claustrophobic and profoundly liberating.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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