Bodies in the peat

[shewhomust]

We went on Thursday to the Lit & Phil for the launch of Val McDermid's new book, The Grave Tattoo. One of the questions from the audience was "Aren't you ever worried that someone might steal your idea?", and of course Val said no, that wasn't a problem, if you gave six crime writers the same plot idea they would still write six completely different books. As it happens, I can illustrate this from my current reading:

Val had just read the opening section of The Grave Tattoo:

The Prelude

September 2005

All landscapes hold their own secrets. Layer on layer, the past is buried beneath the surface. Seldom irrevocable, it lurks, waiting for human agency or meteorological accident to force the skeleton up through flesh and skin back into the present. Like the poor, the past is always with us.

That summer, it rained as if England had been transported to the tropics. Water fell in torrents, wrecking glorious gardens, turning meadows into quagmires where livestock struggled hock-deep in mud. Rivers burst their banks, their suddenly released waters finding their own level by demolishing whatever was vulnerable in their path. In the flooded streets of one previously picturesque village, cars were swept up like toys and deposited in the harbour, choking it in a chaos of mangled metal. Landslips swamped cars with mud and farmers mourned lost crops.

No part of the country was immune from the sheets of stinging rain. City and countryside alike Struggled under the weight of water. In the Lake District, it sheeted down over fell and dale, subtly alering the contours of a centuries-old landscape. The water levels in the lakes reached record summer highs; the only discernable benefit was that when the sun did occasional shine, it revealed a lusher green than usual.

Above the village of Fellhead on the shores of Langmere, ancient peat hags were carved into new shapes under the onslaught of water. And as autumn crept in, gradually the earth gave up one of its close-held secrets.

From a distance, it looked like a scrunched-up tarpaulin, stained brown by the brackish water of the bog. At first glance, it seemed insignificant; another piece of discarded rubbish that had worked its way to the surface. But closer inspection revealed something far more chilling. Something that would reach across the centuries and bring even more profound changes in its wake than the weather.

As I planned, I am now reading Useful Idiots, by the much-lamented Jan Mark. It, too, starts with a storm which reveals something long-buried:

The gale came out of the north-west and struck in the early hours. Across the Isles its progress and approach had been monitored throughout the night as rivers boiled over, monorails and bridges collapsed, roofs disintegrated. In the city canyons, small buildings imploded and storm drains burst while flood alarms blared. Everywhere solar panels were destroyed.

By the time it reached the coast it was at hurricane force. There was no rain left to fall. Under a clear sky it was a dry wind that raced across the low hills, sucking ponds empty, flattening the reeds in the marshes, crushing bushes, felling trees, driving out to sea with a screaming hiss. At the Briease Reserve, between the fen and the shore, windows bellied and buckled with every gust, but the roofs were constructed as they had been for centuries to withstand coastal weather, the tumult of the North Sea, and when daylight came the houses still stood.

The first children who ventured over the dunes to Parizo Beach in the hope of finding sea wrack discovered only what they had lost. The tide was going out, snarling and dragging its way seaward, lunging back to crash sullenly on the barren black shore. The beach had been golden, but in five hours the fearful pressure had scoured away every grain of sand to expose the peat that had lain beneath. Still wet, it glistened oilily under the chill rays of the early sun that crawled across the shore, and the gulls were on it already, strutting, grabbing, seeking what they might devour. The bald beach was empty; the treasure seekers would have to wait for the afternoon tide before anything arrived, the lattermath of the hurricane. The children returned home cold and empty-handed over the sand hills, through the rasping marram grass. The one thing they might have found was as yet no more than a bulge, like a worn cobblestone, scarcely proud of the peat in which it lay embedded. There were to be three more tides before the bulge became a cupola, then a dome and then, as the mumbling sea withdrew, two bony brows emerged from the peat and frowned at the horizon.

Val McDermid reaches back from the present-day into the history of the nineteenth century - real history, spinning from the extraordinary fact that William Wordsworth and Fletcher Christian were schoolfellows. Jan Mark's central character also investigates the past, but as a professional archaeologist - and her novel is set in the year 2255. No problem here with comparable starting points leading to similar books, then.

Comments

[sovay]

No problem here with comparable starting points leading to similar books, then.

Well, similar only in that both of these excerpts really make me want to read the books . . .

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

*g*

[hunningham.livejournal.com]

Suddenly come over all nostalgic. I got a subscription to the
Lit&Phil as a present when I was living in Newscastle; it was one of those very surprising but pleasing presents.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

You were living in Newcastle? Small world...

Yes, the Lit & Phil is an extraordinary place, and they are developing a fun sideline as a venue for literary events.