Signals of Distress

I'm cold and wet. I'm tired and hungry. And, I'm sitting comfortably at home. Crace uses words to paint pictures. He uses words to awaken all your senses. I've just left the England of a century and a half ago. To get the full effect of this book you have to have lived in a small town, as I do. City folk should realize these are real people and their counterparts exist even in today's small town America (as I'm sure they do elsewhere in the world). I can put local names to many of the characters. It's hard to explain the relationships and dependencies that can bring disparate people together - or push them apart. Crace understands this and presents it amazingly well. If you haven't read any of Jim Crace's books, this is a good one to start with. Great fun!

Aymer Smith is a fussy, pretentious, absurd, lonely little man. It's impossible to like him, so he he has no friends, but it is possible to admire him by the time this lyrically beautiful tale ends. Aymer is a bourgeois liberal. The depth of his empathy for enslaved Africans and for struggling English laborers is difficult to discern, yet he does suffer physical hardship and severe injury for his beliefs. Life for this novel's sailors, fisher folk and kelpers is, indeed, "nasty, brutish and short." Aymer talks the good fight and does as much as he easily can to alleviate their distress -- how many of us do better than that? Crace's prose is luminous, a joy to read.

I was uncertain choosing this at the library. The Atlantic Monthly review of this book compared the author to "the best" literary Brits: Salman Rushdie (no interest), Ian McEwan ("ominous" writing for others, flat to me) and Martin Amis (dreary). Now I am so glad I did! This book is wonderfully atmospheric, similar to Island by Jane Rodgers but less dark, and I was hooked immediately. As the characters are introduced they are wonderfully rooted in time and place. And Aymer Smith the main character is a real achievement: a contemptibly dishonest windbag yet pathetically human and somehow sympathetic. The puzzle of what this character represented for the author and what he was going to do with him, finally wouldn't let me put the book down. Highest recommendation!

The excruciating detail with which Crace describes each event and each stretch of English coast are but the beginning of this book's power. His unflinching portrait of the lives of his characters leaves no corner unturned. With the smallest of observations, worlds begin to shift and characters head towards inevitable decline or ascent. Aymer Smith is an almost unbearably painful creation. He is at once utterly sympathetic and detestable. He seems to be the sum total of every self-conscious fear a modern liberal might have. We watch him with compassion and fear and horror and smugness. And those with whom he comes into contact are drawn no less sparingly. There is not one character one would hope to be, and yet we may see ourselves in pieces of each of them. This kind of writing and acuity grip the reader from the opening gale and refuse to let go as we squirm to avoid knowing the end of Aymer's story. Wonderful and terrible.

The beautiful J.M.W. Turner painting on the cover of this book really suits it--an eerie balance of cheery and grim. The setting inevitably reminds one of Dickens, and even the characters seem Dickens-inspired up to a point, with names like Alice Yapp, Palmer Dolly, and Preacher Phipps. But the language is decidedly more modern and the characters, in the end, much more complex, with the possible exception of Fidia Smith, who is so fastidious as to place a napkin over her mauled brother-in-law's feet as he is carried through her house. The brother-in-law, Aymer Smith, is the book's protagonist, and is, as the copy on the back cover states, "a foolish well-intentioned prig." He is gullible, horny, and weepy by turns, utterly scrutable in the most loveable way. He is a lonely loner whose best efforts at connection with other people always seem to be thwarted by his good intentions. He is a staunch and outspoken abolitionist, which seems to annoy everyone in this small English town, since slavery is outlawed and the general attitude is "Why the hell do you want to talk about it then?" But Smith's greatest signifying act is to secretly set free an African slave who is cargo on an American ship wrecked in the town's harbor. The African, Otto, disappears entirely from the story, except in the superstitious-racist minds of the town, who happily blame all unusual or undesirable occurrences on his appeareance in their world. The novel comes to a grinding, hair-raising halt in a whirlwind of desparation, violence, and, ultimately, eerie silence. This is a great book for any reader of fiction, whether or not you have any interest in things nautical/historical/British. Its brilliant character portraiture, quirky plot twists, ghosty morality, and many Truly Weird and Interesting Moments make it a top-notch novel that deserves a lot more attention