The story, told in the present-tense, is of a woman whose name, for some reason, we are not told until well after half way through the book. She has, we learn obliquely, lost a child and has left her husband and her family behind without warning, with very little money and few possessions, and ended up in a coastal tourist town as it comes to the end of the season. Here, she is isolated, poor, cold, bleak and alienated. She has occasional sex to manipulate men into helping her and the regrets it, she eventually gets a job and is also helped by the friendship of one woman in the town.
And that’s pretty much it, with a few events which would be spoilers if revealed and a slightly (but only slightly) redemptive note right toward the end. Frankly, I found it rather turgid and depressing to no real end. I didn’t find it a particularly profound study of grief; the emptiness felt by the protagonist is well evoked, but that’s all it is for a very long time. This is a small example of the prose: “She is sandwiched between the two of them: the old and the young, the drunk and the nearly drunk. She pictures herself this way: cold cut, melted cheese, a tomato slick with seeds.” There is so much in this vein and with this rhythm that I found rather mannered. And picturing herself as “cold cut, melted cheese, a tomato slick with seeds”? Seriously? It smacks of Creative Writing Course to me and didn’t appeal.
I’m sorry to be so critical, but I really didn’t enjoy Tides. It’s worth two stars rather than one for the evocation of the main character’s bleak emotional state and the merit of being short. Others may get more from it than I did, but it really wasn’t for me.
(My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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