Once Upon A River: A Novel
Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River: A Novel came out in 2018, but as I began to float through its pages, it felt very Victorian in style. Setterfield populates her lyrical narrative with characters who embody archetypal roles—good or evil; outsider, liminal or privileged; young or old—as feels appropriate for her novel’s nineteenth-century setting. Also, like Dickens or Hardy, Setterfield’s novel unravels slowly as she introduces various characters whom the story eventually brings together—like tributaries of the river Thames—and it took me a while to navigate the story’s current. The novel nods to this winding start when we read river for story: “En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination—or put it aside for the while” (57). Once I was clear on the major players, I fully enjoyed Setterfield’s beautiful prose and clever storytelling. As the first section of the book concluded, I had begun to fall deeply in love with several of the characters and thoroughly distrust others.
As the title might suggest, Once Upon a River, scrutinizes the way to tell a story and, at times, Setterfield pauses in the narrative to tease out the metaphor of story as river (and vice versa). She also plays with the concept of seeing and knowing, both in terms of optics, lenses, and early photography, but also in terms of Seeing and Knowing truth. Once Upon a River ruminates upon a time in the nineteenth-century when magic and science, ghost story and mystery, were two sides of the same coin. Her characters feel Dickensian to me, and their stories abound with beautiful details, heartbreaking tragedy and all the darkness any of us may know from these mortal coils: rape, love beyond societal conceit, evil, suppressed memory, and grief. The novel’s narrator pauses midway through the book to remind the reader of his or her omniscient position: “There are stories that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all” (247). Some of the novel’s themes might only be whispered, or witnessed by the river (and reader). Once Upon a River also examines modern questions of biology and heredity, psychology and spirituality, even the myriad complexity of parenthood (the impact of a child’s death on parents, parenting down syndrome, the dangers of childbirth for Victorian women, and parenting children who turn out rotten). After hundreds of pages exploring the lightness and darkness, the joy and pain, of the human experience, this novel is ultimately a redemptive story; one that brings its reader up and down the river of the story until it overflows its banks. After the cleansing flood waters, Setterfield’s novel closes in hope and renewal.
At the heart of this novel, is a little girl, or rather three little girls, who disappear with one mysteriously reappearing in the arms of a badly wounded man on winter solstice night. She is dead and then she lives again, or so the story goes. Is it magic or a miracle? Is there a reasonable scientific explanation? These questions propel the novel, and its many characters, towards its conclusion (on the following winter solstice), at which point all characters have transformed as a result of their contact with the child. Other characters include (but are certainly not limited to) an early photographer with a floating dark room, a nurse raised by nuns with no knowledge of her heredity, a mixed race farmer, a pub on the river famed for its stories and the family that runs it, a very special pig, a butcher’s boy, a young married couple of means, and a disturbed but reliable woman living on the outskirts of society who chooses the name Lily White for herself as if to rewrite her story. In the vein of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, each of these many characters brings something unique and important to the conclusion of the story, providing an impressive punctuation mark at the close of Setterfield’s brilliantly crafted novel.
Having studied the nexus of science and art in the Victorian era for my master’s thesis fifteen years ago, I loved how Setterfield toys with the tension between miracles and/or magic, and what the scientific method can rationally explain. At times this book read like a ghost story, at others it was very modern in its scientific inquiry. This novel unpacks the modern desire to know all, and it seems to remind the twenty-first-century reader that somethings cannot be known or understood fully—there still is a magic in the world. At the book’s close the river signifies not only the story, but the Story, our story, that of Life. The novel concludes that perhaps its very project, to tell a story about the river, is an impossibility (again reminiscent of Victorian novels’ style): “[T]he river was too vast a thing to be contained in any book. Majestic, powerful, unknowable, it lends itself tolerantly to the doings of men until it doesn’t, and then anything can happen” (457-58). Echoing the Victorian authors who often apologized for the flaws of their craft, Setterfield’s novel begs the question, did it succeed? I whole-heartedly concede in the affirmative, and encourage others to take up the challenge of weighing in on this question.
Woven through all the mystery of Once Upon a River is the Thames River, and, of course, Setterfield’s figurative prose. By the second section of this book, I longed to visit the Thames and walk its well-established banks, stare into its murky water, wander around its old locks and weirs, and explore upstream from Oxford. But my travels took me elsewhere; I finished reading this book in northern California last week, amidst the massive flooding around Sacramento and the counties north of the Bay Area. It seemed a fitting setting to finish this masterful work about rivers and stories. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a compelling read dripping with beautiful language and characters who you find yourself thinking about long after you’ve read the final lines. With Once Upon a River’s characters still bright in my mind’s eye, I am eager to pick up her other books: The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel (2006) and Bellman and Black: A Novel (2013).
I longed to visit the Thames and walk its well-established banks, stare into its murky water, wander around its locks and weirs, and explore upstream from Oxford. But my travels took me elsewhere; I finished this book in northern California last week, amidst the massive flooding around Sacramento and in the counties north of the Bay Area.
A Few Great Passages:
There are so many incredibly woven passages in this novel that I find it wildly challenging to highlight only a few… I apologize if I list too many here.
“A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination—or put it aside for the while” (57).
“The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky while meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it foes than where it came from” (59).
“He had determined to build a family with Bess, not fragmented and splintered, but whole and entire, and he permitted no member of it to be left on the outside. There was love enough for all. Love would hold them together” (67).
“He had found the line that separated humans from the animal kingdom to be a porous one, and all the things that people thought unique to them—intelligence, kindness, communication—he had seen in his pigs, his horse, even the rooks that hopped and strutted among his cows. And there was this: the methods he used on animals generally bore fruit when applied to people too. He could usually win them round in the end” (100).
“The whole of life was a mystery, if you delved even a little way under the surface, and causes and effects not infrequently came adrift from each other. On top of these daily bewilderments, the story of the girl who died and lived again was one he drew consolation from as he marveled at it, for it demonstrated conclusively that life was fundamentally inexplicable, and there was no point trying to understand anything” (206).
“She handed him a stick and indicated with a vigorous motion that he should dig a channel with it. She lined it with her stones. She was exacting in her expectations, and it took some time before she was satisfied. Then he understood: they were to watch it. They saw how the water trickled in, and how it silted up, and how rapidly the work of the river undid the work of a man and a child” (259).
“‘Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or a companion in grief. My husband and I studied together in America. There is a new science over there; it can be explained in complicated ways, but you won’t go far wrong in thinking of its as a science of human emotion’” (343).
“This deviation in the story was not met with enthusiasm. A story ought to go clearly in one direction and then, after a distinct moment of crisis, change to go in another. This slipping back on the quiet to the original lacked the requisite drama” (378).
“He wondered, fancifully whether there was a way of appeasing the spirit of the river. A way of encouraging it to be on your side and not dangerously against you. Along with the dead dogs, illegal liquor, rashly flung wedding rings, and stolen goods that litter the riverbed, there are offerings of gold and silver down there. Ritualistic offerings whose meanings are hard to fathom so many centuries later. He might throw something in himself. His book? He considered it” (458).
Bibliography:
Setterfield, Diane. Once Upon a River: A Novel. Emily Bestler Books/ATRIA, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, 2018.
