Like much of Barney Norris’s work (his 2018 novel Turning for Home and his latest play, We Started to Sing), Undercurrent deals with beginnings and endings, love and loss, and borrows from his own family’s experience. It opens at a wedding where Ed meets a young woman, Amy, who claims he rescued her from drowning when they were children. Ed feels the pull of something, as does Juliet, his girlfriend of six years. Shortly afterwards, they split up and he begins to see Amy.
At first you think this is going to be a novel about thirtysomething relationships, lovers recognising the “secret currents which align our lives”, but then the focus shifts. Norris offers a profound meditation on dealing with loss and finding your moorings in destabilising times. Throughout, he compares the ebb and flow of life to the undercurrents of water.
