Barney Norris - Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

I thought this was an excellent book.  Barney Norris writes with clear-eyed, unflinching insight into the human condition, but with real compassion and a redemptive note of hope which makes this something quite special.

Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain is a sequence of five stories, each narrated in the first person by a variety of characters all of whom live in or near Salisbury.  It becomes clear eventually that their stories are related to a greater or lesser extent, but each is an individual tale.  It's hard to give an idea of "plot" because these are chiefly character studies and the point of the book is their individual stories and the light they shed on what it is to live and to love, and how we can sometimes end up somewhere wholly other, and sometimes as someone else entirely, from what we planned or expected.  There is the ex-wild-child florist and part-time drug dealer, the adolescent falling in love for the first time just as his father becomes gravely ill, the old man whose wife dies after a contented life together, the desperately lonely, depressed army wife and the young man returning "home" to Salisbury after heartbreak in London.  It's a very disparate cast, which Norris paints with exceptional perception and skill so all of them seemed absolutely real and recognisable to me, and all of them had something important to say.

Just as examples, Sam is fifteen and falling in love.  It's a very well-worn theme, but I thought it exceptionally well done and incredibly poignant.  Norris brilliantly captures the mixture of excitement, delight and terror, and that sense that no-one, especially such a wonder as the girl you admire so, could possibly be interested in you.  I was very moved by his story, and by the others.

The voices were completely convincing to me, and Norris has a skilled dramatist's way of placing events and ideas whose significance becomes clear later on, so it's very well structured, too.  This book has an air of melancholy and loss, but also of hope and human fulfilment.  I found it very readable, utterly absorbing and rather profound in places.  I can recommend it very warmly.