Seize the moment: Undercurrent, by Barney Norris, reviewed

Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion that does, paving the way for a story about love, family and stories themselves, which is apt from a writer who is known for his dramas on the stage as much as on the page.

Ed, who narrates half the novel, is there with his girlfriend Juliet, wondering why they’re yet to get married. It’s the expense, he supposes, and the not knowing what sort of ring to buy. And so he allows time to drift by, ‘just letting it happen to me, rather than me doing very much with it’. But then the wedding photographer, Amy, recognises Ed from a chance encounter as children and his story starts to change.

Norris, who teaches creative writing at the University of Oxford, does a great deal with time in Undercurrent, both structurally and mechanically. Most of the narrative unfurls throughout 2019, but we also loop back through the 20th century to explore Ed’s family, who come from a Welsh sheep farm. First stop is 1911 India, where we meet Phoebe, who will become Ed’s great-grandmother after she marries Arthur, who brings her home to Wales.

Norris writes to slow down time, to remind us to grab it rather than watch it drift past. Otherwise, like Ed, we’ll always imagine there’ll be more time. ‘Who doesn’t?’ Enough happens to propel the plot, but this is a book to savour for what goes on inside Ed’s head as much as outside as he grapples with the weight of his family’s history. He is consumed by the concept of home and what it means:

“Home, an idea which is constructed out of place, people, and stories above all. A synonym for love. It’s the memory of Christmases when no one had to worry where to spend them, where to go. The memory of a childhood when nothing was complicated. If such a thing ever really existed at all.

Later, driving with Amy for a holiday in Cornwall, Ed ponders:

“These escapes. These brief freedoms that come round like choruses in the song of our long, loving goodbye to the life that has been lent us. I never quite know what they mean. Are we really travelling outwards when we drive into the countryside, or are we trying, somehow, to return home? Is the journey really back and in, a reach for memory?

If Norris’s prose sometimes feels a bit metaphor heavy – there are a lot of tides and currents – he can be forgiven in a book this beautiful and useful. His writing untangles the knots that tie us down, to families, to history. He writes to free us and deserves our thanks.