Slim but eventful ... Squarely, cinematically plotted: There’s a flare gun that appears early on with a Chekhovian nod, and a fraught climactic sequence that treads heavily between fever dream and magic realism.
The premise seems humdrum and unpromising, but there is plenty of intrigue ... So much of the drama is simply in the tension of Wood’s sentences, which hook you from the beginning ... The result is a fiercely atmospheric novel that engages the senses.
The wonder of this book is how Wood delivers so much in few words. Thomas’s irascible character is conveyed efficiently ... Every detail, every scene...fits intricately together in a story about all the big things and all the everyday things ... Reads like the forging of a new myth: one about how an alternative life is possible, and may even be starting to happen inside you already.
Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog ... What makes Wood’s writing such a pleasure is his attentiveness to the prosaic details of everyday life ... While some of the dialogue veers close to folksy, and Edgar is straight from central casting, there’s a clarity of observation and lack of sentimentality that raises the book from a simple tale of unfulfilled lives and nostalgia for a vanished past.
The novel...begins to falter ... There is a slightly silly dream sequence, in which Thomas writes a song with the father he never knew, and a boring encounter with Edgar’s put-upon mother, who turns up to whisk him away and fill in his backstory. The tone, already prone to corniness, becomes increasingly strained, and increasingly emphatic, as the importance of art and of following one’s dreams is stressed. The ending is rather neat. This is all a shame. Seascraper’s opening pages – so pungent and particular – suggest the possibility of a more singular and unsparing focus, and a novel more nuanced and less mawkish.
