From his 2016 debut, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, prolific novelist and playwright Barney Norris has never been afraid to address the Big Stuff. The brevity of life; the fragility of love; the mysteries of memory and consciousness. Through an array of unnervingly convincing ventriloquised voices, he has excelled at pinpointing the pivotal moments in his characters’ emotional lives. His fourth book, Undercurrent, is equally engaged with universal themes, with a Hardyesque focus on chance, agency and grief. However, while each of his first three novels transfixed the reader with a series of claustrophobic, almost unbearably intense monologues, Norris switches here to the ventilated space of a single first-person voice.
We meet the thirtysomething narrator, Ed, at a wedding, stuck in an unhappy relationship with his indifferent girlfriend, Juliet: “I have stopped being happy somewhere … When did that happen? And what am I going to do about it?” Ed decides that he has become “unmoored in the midst of life”, but his fate is changed by encountering Amy, the wedding’s photographer. Except it’s not the first time they’ve met. He discovers that Amy is the girl he saved from drowning during a childhood swimming misadventure; a cosmic accident, and an opportunity he feels strangely impelled to explore: “These choices present themselves to us thousands of times every day, and turn into our lives.” They quickly become a couple and begin a life of tentative cohabitation, meeting Amy’s adoptive parents and Ed’s own mother and stepfather on the Welsh farm where he grew up.
