A short review of Land Beneath the Waves by Nic Wilson.
This is a very rewarding read, which combines frank and raw reflections on ill health with lyrical explorations of nature and place. A kind of Salt Path with added interiority and less locomotion.
Biographical studies of writers, and especially those who have written for children ,frequently allude to the role of childhood sickness in spurring creativity and granting the gift of seeing the world as children see it- with immediacy but greatly limited powers to affect things. But few are able to get inside such experiences, and yet Nic Wilson does. Her accounts of personal and family illness are revelatory and unflinching, and I can’t think of anyone who has better described the feelings of a bookish child discovering and entering fictional worlds before sleep.
Nic wrote this book in Hitchin , where she has lived for the last 20 years and she cleverly draws on the geology of the area as a metaphor for the layers and sediments of experience, memory, history, that shape all our lives. Literally, in the case of chalk, as it forms our very bones.
If you love local history, botany, the life of animals, or the baffling wonder of being human you will enjoy this book and the connections Nic makes, and you will probably find echoes in your own experience, as I did.
Another way of thinking about Nic’s achievement here is to see it as being a mystery story with existential touches worthy of St Augustine. She shares an honest and profound search for herself, which although profoundly particular, is also universal, and never self absorbed or sentimental and is intensely responsive to the ecological crisis of today.
Her story is set too, like most of ours amidst ordinary life in a superficially unremarkable town. Where work family and health are as much a part of the adventure as the leafy giants we often walk past every day without noticing.
Another way I could