![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/\/7ad0ec93-3c24-43ef-9b08-6ae20484e5ae.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Woods tends to follow working-class loners who are fascinated by human creativity but get dragged down by treachery, madness or something from their past. In his latest \u2014 and shortest \u2014 novel, Seascraper, people are quite literally pulled under the earth into the \u201csinkpits\u201d of a beach, which look like \u201cpudding batter\u201d. Thomas Flett, a 20-year-old cart shanker (a kind of shrimper), knows the beach well. He warns outsiders: \u201cThe sand\u2019s got arms in different places, see \u2014 if you\u2019re not careful or you\u2019re stupid, you\u2019ll get dragged below.\u201d <\/p>\n
Thomas is working his grandfather\u2019s gruelling trade, scraping for shrimp on the fictional Longferry beach (which resembles the Lancashire coast) in the 1960s. He\u2019s a frustrated folk musician who lives a slow and lonely life with his young, flirtatious mother, Lillian, while secretly pining for Joan, who works in the post office. <\/p>\n
The premise seems humdrum and unpromising, but there is plenty of intrigue: a missing father whom Thomas has never known and is rumoured to have been his mother\u2019s school teacher (\u201che got her in the family way at fifteen years of age\u201d) and, later, a mysterious Hollywood film director who wants to use the beach as a location.<\/p>\n
And yet so much of the drama is simply in the tension of Wood\u2019s sentences, which hook you from the beginning. Take this passage from the opening paragraph: \u201cThere\u2019s all sorts in the water now that wasn\u2019t there when he was just a lad. Strange chemicals and pesticides and sewage. Barely a few weeks ago there was a putrid fatty sheen upon the sand from east to west; a month before he waded in a residue of foam that reeked of curdled milk as he approached the shallows. Fleeting things, but if you\u2019re asking him they augur trouble \u2014 it\u2019s been hard to sleep of late.\u201d<\/p>\n
This world of dadding lines, motor rigs and fishing regulations is disrupted by Edgar Acheson, a tall, seemingly self-assured American who intends to make a film in Longferry with Henry Fonda as the lead. Thomas is immediately struck by Edgar\u2019s \u201cdeep-set eyes as brown as bladderwrack, his dark hair combed in floppy waves\u201d. The director arrives at Thomas and Lillian\u2019s home bearing good-quality rib-eye steaks and proffering a magazine article in which he is pictured, captioned as the director of a film called The Cutting Room. <\/p>\n
\u2022 80 best books to take on holiday this summer \u2014 chosen by the experts<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Now he\u2019s in preproduction for his adaptation of a book called The Outermost and believes Longferry can double as 1880s costal Maine, a \u201cfoggy little town where everything\u2019s a bit unusual\u201d. He wants Thomas to help him to navigate the beach and \u201cthe way of life out there\u201d for a fee of \u00a3100. This is several months\u2019 worth of pay, allowing Thomas more time to work on his music. Although he appears surly, excitement courses through him: \u201cThere\u2019s now a cool, soft, effervescent feeling in his blood, a sense of possibility that\u2019s spreading from his heart down to his ingrown toenails.\u201d Edgar is the most fascinating man Thomas has encountered and he allows Thomas to entertain fantasies of escaping Longferry to fulfil his musical ambitions. <\/p>\n If there is an abiding theme to Wood\u2019s writing it is the dreams and delusions of big thinkers and the issues that arise when their creativity is thwarted. As Joan tells Thomas, \u201cPerhaps I\u2019m wrong, but aren\u2019t you dead if you\u2019re not dreaming?\u201d They are discussing Rupert Brooke\u2019s romantic poem Day That I Have Loved, which is quoted in the fictional book The Outermost and is also the epigraph to Seascraper. Brooke evokes the passing of a perfect day, which leaves the sun setting over \u201cthe drear waste darkening\u201d. It\u2019s a phrase that makes Thomas think about the \u201chopelessness\u201d that sometimes engulfs him.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more book reviews and interviews \u2014 and see what\u2019s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n The novel is also set mostly over one day in Thomas\u2019s life in which his usual punishing routine \u2014 \u201call those dreary shifts at sea\u201d \u2014 is disturbed. The reality of shanking is wonderfully evoked, the \u201cpervasive sweat and shrimp rot fish guts, crab flesh, seaweed, dander, forage, gull shit, horse dung\u201d clogging up his pores and fingernails. Like the experimental architects in The Young Accomplice, Thomas is often battling the elements, the slapping rain and gnawing wind. Curiously, Wood decided to embrace the weather when he was writing Seascraper, working outdoors for the first time and composing the book in longhand. The result is a fiercely atmospheric novel that engages the senses. <\/p>\n There\u2019s even some music that you can listen to. If you follow a link to the publisher\u2019s website<\/a>, you\u2019ll find a recording of Thomas\u2019s poignant dream song written and sung by the novelist. Wood has confessed that he also dreamt of a record deal in his twenties, revealing in the book\u2019s final page the author as the ultimate frustrated creative.<\/p>\n