Ben Tufnell, curator, gallery director and essayist with particular expertise in land art, describes his fascination for the “‘slow time’ of painting”. His first novel, The North Shore, might be best understood as an experiment in translating the slow time of painting into fiction. The book loops and meanders through the narrator’s lifelong relationship with his childhood home on the North Norfolk coast, revisiting and reiterating the book’s thematic concerns more in the manner of a musical fugue than a story.
We begin with the young adult narrator left alone in a seaside cottage on the night of a wild and frightening storm. Trees fall, roofs smash, and by the cold light of day the unnamed storyteller goes down to the beach, where he finds what appears to be a body. Even at this dramatic climax, the prose moves slowly: “It then occurred to me that this occurrence – this dead man on the beach – was something I should report … There would surely be some kind of official process.” But the man is not dead, although also not exactly alive, and probably not exactly a man either. The boy takes him home and tries to look after him, but the strange visitor never speaks. He coughs up impossible quantities of seaweed and leaves, smells terrible, turns a funny colour, and then he goes away.
