Every Seventh Wave

by Tom Vowler

Every Seventh Wave has strong echoes of Fiona Mozley's Elmet and Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing. Strongly lyrical, the novel also serves as a literary thriller, with a suspenseful pace that builds to its redemptive finale. People-trafficking, fraternal love and violence are the fulcrum the novel turns on, the latter rippling outwards, sparing no one. Every Seventh Wave is a literary tale of the fates we tether ourselves to, how seemingly benign encounters can provoke both hope and devastation.

187 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2021

About the author

TOM VOWLER is an award-winning novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His debut story collection, The Method, won the Scott Prize and the Edge Hill Readers' Prize, while his novels What Lies Within and That Dark Remembered Day received critical acclaim. He is an Arvon tutor and an associate lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, where he completed his PhD. His second collection of stories, Dazzling the Gods, was published in 2018, and his new novel, Every Seventh Wave, is out now.

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

To live on the edge of things, he thought. The meeting of two worlds, a liminal frontier, from known to unknown as land gave way to leagues of nothing but sea and all it had laid claim to.

This novel is published by the Cromer in North Norfolk small press Salt Publishing who “believe books are key to developing an imaginative life, and that the imagination is key to being fully human.”

It is set in Cornwall, and opens with a third party point of view character, a man living in a once grand costal house, now fatally undermined by cliff erosion and undercutting, seeing a woman walk out deep into the sea. He risks his own life to drag her from the sea, revives her and takes her back to his property where over time we learn a little of both their lives at this meeting of two different, but equally troubled and tragic, worlds, both bound up with the surrounding seas.

The man is Hallam and over time we learn of his backstory. His mother and father moving, mainly at his mother’s suggestion, to this run-down house they had spotted on holidays to Cornwall – where they open it as a guest house in an attempt to revive the parent’s faltering marriage. Hallam and his older brother Blue win warying acceptance from the local schoolchildren mainly due to Blue’s daring egg-collecting exploits. An exploit to far with a Rook’s nest precipitates a complete unravelling of all their lives and to Hallam’s eventual return many years later.

The girl is a Rumanian Anca – and when the book abruptly switches to the voice of an Eastern European crime gang member living in Cornwall we immediately realise she has fled the world of people trafficking (for both farm labour gangs and sex workers).

Gradually Hallam and Anca draw a little closer and sense a possible future together but with the ever present threat of violence.

There are two particularly strong passages in the book: Anca’s tale as she enters the water for release only to sense, almost too late, that her will to live is greater; and an exquisite scene, played from both parts, when Hallam wakes to realise Anca is asleep beside him having searched for warmth giving him the hope of some form of connection. I did however find the finale of the book, described as redemptive on the blurb, too drenched in male violence for my tastes.

Cycles of seven [his mother] said waves came in, the seventh the most powerful, and though he now knew this to be apocryphal, like all folktales there was probably a truth in it ………..
He had found himself under the sea’s spell since returning, fascinated by how it ordered itself, how water bound together, uprearing into waves … Their angles and geometry, chaotic yet ordered. It spoke to him, the sea, in this new life he had, as it had to her

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man’s inhumanity to man…

As Hallam gazes out one evening over the sea that is gradually encroaching on his clifftop home, he sees a woman walking out into the waves. With no time for thought, he rushes down to pull her back ashore. Anca is a Romanian, victim of people traffickers. Over the next couple of days these two lonely, damaged people will find in each other’s company a glimpse of a different life that might have been theirs if circumstances had been different. And the reader will learn what brought each of them to this point in their lives.

Set in Cornwall, Vowler writes lyrically about the sea, portraying it as the great mother from whom we all came and to whom those in trouble often return, perhaps for balm, perhaps for oblivion. Hallam lived in the big house on the cliff as a boy, part of a family that was gradually shattered and destroyed by tragedy. The house has been empty for years and is falling into decay, unsellable since the encroachment of the sea means that soon the cliff will give way beneath it. But for Hallam it provides a kind of sanctuary, a place where he can isolate himself from a world that has left him hurt, alone and emotionally scarred. He watches the sea as his mother did, soothed and awed by its power and immensity.

Anca is young, so her tale is shorter and more brutal. Lured by promises of a more exciting life, she has ended up in the hands of the traffickers who bring women in to work as modern slaves – in the fields if they’re lucky, in the sex trade if they’re not. Anca is not lucky. Vowler writes unsparingly of the brutality – the bestiality, one might say – of the men who use these girls and young women for their sexual pleasure, knowing that they are trafficked. He shows the traffickers controlling the women through lies and threats, and through physical violence if the women show any defiance. Vowler refers to Cornwall’s long history of smuggling – the romantic stories of rum runners and excise men in an uneasy juxtaposition with this vile modern trade of people smuggling.

The third character we learn about is one of the traffickers, the one who is being held responsible for allowing Anca to escape. Girls are easily replaceable so in that sense she’s no great loss, but there is the question of whether she will go to the police. So he is sent out to hunt for her and to bring her back. Vowler gives him some humanity – not much, but still more than I felt he deserved. It would be stretching to say he is kind to the women, but perhaps he’s a little less cruel than some of the others.

The blurb describes it as a “literary thriller”, but I think that’s misleading. It’s more of a tragedy, with doom writ large on these characters’ lives. As I was reading, I could see no way that Vowler could pull off a thriller-style goodies-beat-baddies ending without trashing the authenticity he had built up in the characterisation, and happily he doesn’t try to. This means that the book feels completely credible, but also means that it’s entirely bleak. As it should be, of course, when dealing with one of the worst contemporary aspects of man’s inhumanity to man, but it makes it a grim and depressing read. The blurb also calls the ending “redemptive”. Hmm, perhaps their definition of that word is different to mine. I came away with no feeling of redemption; rather, with a sense of hopelessness and despair. Beautifully written, insightful and emotionally truthful – a powerful read, if you can bear the bleakness and cruelty.

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[Adelaide · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I picked up this book from the library I was not expecting such a moving, deeply beautiful and heartbreaking piece of writing to shatter my world the way it did. Incredibly beautiful writing that looks at grief, violence and loss in such a deeply moving way.

I’ve hardly sobbed as hard as I have at the ending of a book as I did this one. TOM VOWLER IS SADISTIC FOR WHAT HE DID IN THE LAST 10 PAGES OF THIS BOOK. HOWLING, SNOT FILLED UGLY SOBBING AT 1:30 IN THE MORNING.

There is a point to be made though- It’s only great writing that can make you feel so deeply as this one did me. I warn you to avoid this book at all costs and yet simultaneously couldn’t recommend it more.

5 stars for sure.

[Stephen Buckland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enjoyable read with lyrical style. A lucky pick from the library

[Ashley Stokes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Vowler's follow-up to his impressive collection Dazzling the Gods is a concise, immersive novel of profound emotion and lyricism. By turns, a love story, a haunted house story and then a crime thriller, it's also a meditation on the sea and the land, memory and loss, love and redemption. It's hard not to be swept up and dragged under by the crash and pull of protagonist Hallum's story. As always, Vowler's prose soars. The writing is from page one full of the real stuff of the everyday and the amorphous swirlings of the inner life. Pointedly contemporary yet somehow timeless, Every Seventh Wave is a great achievement.

[Abby Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this. Beautiful literary prose, well crafted and inspiring, looking forward to future books.

[Mairi Byatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly stunning novel, finished in one sitting, highly recommended