Gathering The Water by Robert Edric

Gathering The Water Reviews

• 
  Hugh

  Another book from the 2006 Booker longlist, this is a historical novel set in West Yorkshire in 1848. I have not previously read Edric, who seems to have been quite highly regarded at the time but has rather fallen off the radar more recently.
  
  The narrator Charles Weightman is an outsider sent in by the Board who have been building a new reservoir, who arrives after the dam has been built to monitor the evacuation and the filling of the reservoir. There is not much of a plot beyond the filling of the reservoir and the evacuation of the poor inhabitants of the drowned valley, but the book is strong in atmosphere and human interest is provided by the story of Weightman’s past (a fiancée that fell ill and died shortly before their planned wedding), and his relationship with Mary Latimer, a widow who has returned to her childhood home having rescued her sister Martha from an asylum, partly in a failed attempt to raise the value of the house, which is now largely dilapidated.
  
  The book is an easy read, but I am not entirely clear what made it a Booker candidate – maybe Edric’s earlier books are more striking.
  
• 
  Ni

  Gathering the Water explores a remote Northern valley in the weeks before it is flooded forever. It reads like an allegory; a water board employee dips into the enclosed lives of the inhabitants, having neither the power to help them nor the ability to influence his shadowy employers. His meticulous reports are ignored; he is told to abridge them and he duly fabricates them and immerses himself in the brooding landscape. The image of a rising tide, an unstoppable flood, insinuates itself throughout the novel. Some stories of the landscape which have been buried underground are revealed as the water level rises. We sense Mr Weightman's increasing sympathy with the villagers and the dialogue reveals the gulf that separates him from the inhabitants. The novel works both as a portrait of Victorian northern life and as a model for the pointlessness of many modern day Kafkaesque jobs. Corruption, madness, hypocrisy and ignorance emerge, leading to its tragic conclusion. It's a rare and special novel; it most resembles novel Waterland by Graham Swift, as a portrait of a landscape and its inbred people. It's a novel that can't be easily summarised; images linger on after you've read it, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, thoroughly recommended.
• 
  Jane

  The cover drew me in first. The colour is at the perfect point between blue and grey and the drawing is lovely. Who is the man and what is he looking down at?
  
  I hadn’t read anything by Robert Erdic before, but I was aware that he was a respected author, and so I picked up the book to find out a little more, The premise was intriguing, and so home it came.
  
  In 1847, after the death of his fianceé, Charles Weightman is sent to Yorkshire to supervise the flooding of a valley.
  
  It’s an element of history that I don’t recall finding in a novel before. Springs and wells that have supplied communities with water cannot cope with new demands and population growth, and so valleys are turned into reservoirs.
  
  He expected to find unpopulated countryside, but instead he finds homes still occupied and people who are reluctantly having to leave the only homes they have ever known. And so, of course, Charles meets with suspicion, resentment and downright hostility.
  
  Mary Latimer is a widow. She moved back to her home in the valley so that she could bring her sister home from the asylum, but mow she faces the prospect of losing her home and being forced to send her sister back to the asylum.
  
  There is a mutual recognition between Mary and Charles. acknowlege each other as people who have borne losses, who are isolated, who are trying to do the right thing in difficult situations.
  
  There is no relationship – this isn’t that sort of book – just two lives being swept away as the tide rises.
  
  A great deal is unsaid, and many questions go unanswered, while the rising tide dominates everything. In unskilled hands that might be a problem, but here it somehow works. Indeed, it feels right.
  
  The story is, inevitably, serious and, of course, there can be no happy ending. But it is both moving and gripping as it unravels in perfect, sparse prose, and all of the elements work together beautifully.
  
  Definitely a book that will stay with me, and an author to investigate further,
  
• 
  Andrew Darling

  This is a somewhat puzzling book. The prose is exquisite and the picture Edric paints of the bleak Pennine landscape is perfect; he has an eye and a word for everything which makes the hills mysterious and forbidding and exciting. But to what end? There is little in the way of plot; the novel is a collection of almost random episodes in the brief history of a man sent (in the mid 19th century) to a remote valley to oversee the eviction of the homesteaders so that a new reservoir may be created for the town of Halifax. It is a novel which is at once satisfying and disappointing. Someone, somewhere, wrote that Edric's style is to mirror the unconnectedness of life, to point out that things happen in a random way irrelevant to a central theme or narrative. That is certainly the overall impression created in this novel. Yet it is in many ways gorgeous - the imagery is brilliant and the writing spare and powerful. I shall read it again, for sure.
• 
  Stephen Curran

  A different book now to the one I read seven or eight years ago. With a right wing government in the UK, a story about the dismantling of a poor community for the easy profit of the wealthy feels much closer to home.
  
  The Board are the remote, callous group of investors who have arranged for a valley in the North of England to be flooded. First they hire local men to strip the buildings. Then they outsource the work, for maximum profit. The disadvantaged suffer; the mentally ill. The narrator, a duped pawn in the enterprise, bears witness to it all while grieving over his recently deceased wife. Weights are gradually placed on the scales of loss and gain, "where the loss [is] all here and the gain all elsewhere."
• 
  Susan

  Sadly, I can't think of anything good to say about this book.
  It was miserable, depressing and unbelievably bleak.
  The people in the book who were losing their homes deserved compassion, but they were never described in such a way as to make them real or human enough for me to make a connection with them or their plight.
  The gradual decline of the main character seemed forced, and his whole situation somewhat unbelievable.
  I finished the book in the hope there would be some redeeming element to it......but for me there simply wasn't.
• 
  Siobhan Markwell

  Lovers of historical fiction or fans of Victoriana will find plenty to enjoy in this tale of a southern gentleman engineer sent to a bleak northern valley to document its flooding after a dam is constructed. He's dismayed to find that the human inhabitants, living and dead, are largely still in situ and his somewhat soul-destroying encounters with them as they prepare to leave their homes form the backbone of the novel. There are sub-plots that ruminate on the nature of Victorian entrepreneurship as he is also forced to deal with members of the board of the company that built the dam and some of their surprising shareholders.
  
  Metaphorically, there are obvious biblical and psychological associations with destruction by flood and Edric exploits these, sometimes in a subtle way, with almost biblical references (which I found the blurb referenced too when I'd finished the book) and at other times with some quite gruelling physical and emotional descriptions of characters forced to the limits of their endurance. It's very well-written, with believable characters both civilized and wild, cultured and insane but at times, I felt it was not a novel for the squeamish!
• 
  Roland Marchal

  This is a novel about a man who is sent to the site of a new dam in Lancashire in the 1830s. He is the agent for the owners and his brief includes overseeing the clearances of the existing dwellings and the logistics preparing the dam for use. This is a classic Robert Edric scenario; taking an unglamorous subject and constructing a very readable tale. In the course of his work he is resented by many of the locals whos homes have been affected and his association with a woman he meets and her back story is superb reading. The landscape is very bleak and you can almost feel the drabness from the descriptions but the quality of the writing does not disappoint.
• 
  William Falo

  This is a sad and dark novel that lingers in the mind long after finishing it. The grief in it is sometimes overwhelming, but it is a realistic historical novel. I would read more by Robert Edric after finishing this.
• 
  Samantha

  Beautiful cover! This was a quality read but I felt the lack of plot to sustain me after a while. Not much happens, but it happens in beautiful prose...
• 
  Sofia

  Este livro desiludiu-me imenso. Depois de ler o resumo da capa, fiquei curiosa com o livro e anos se passaram até o conseguir comprar a um preço simpático. Li imensos elogios ao estilo de prosa do autor e vim a descobrir que este livro tinha ficado na longlist para o Booker Prize. Assim que o vi na Fnac, nem pensei duas vezes. Mas que triste desilusão. O livro não conta mais que o dia a dia de uma espécie de inspector de barragens, que se instala num vilarejo prestes a ser submergido pela nova barragem lá construída. O vilarejo fica num ermo de fim do mundo, onde apenas uma habitante não lhe é hostil, e todo o livro é assim, sem nenhum evento de interesse, nada. A tal prosa maravilhosa deve-se ter perdido toda na tradução, porque não lhe vi rasto.
• 
  Nick Davies

  Given to me to read for my book group, the blurb on the back of this, and the Caspar David Friedrich inspired/copied illustration on the cover gave me some hope.
  
  Alas, no, it wasn't to my tastes. This is a tale from the mid Nineteenth Century of an engineer overseeing the flooding of a valley in 'The North', and the resistance of the locals to all this. No, in truth I'm not wholly sure what the point of it all was. I found it relentlessly grim (the ending particularly so) with a writing style veering somehow between young adult simplicity and unnecessary descriptiveness. But all it was describing was wet grey cold scenery (yeah, we get it) and uninteresting characters. Admittedly there were only two characters of any depth, everyone else was a simpleton stereotype.
• 
  Lucinda

  At times a bit too spare in its storytelling, this historical novel embeds itself pretty deeply in the Bronte-esque bleak 19th-century landscape of northern England's moorlands. One particular valley is about to be flooded, owing to the construction of a dam. The contrast between who benefits and who suffer is stark indeed. People with next to nothing clinging stubbornly to their homes and fields, as the water starts to creep up around them; and our protagonist is given the unenviable task of reporting on the 'progress' of the waters and the necessary removal of the people and all evidence of their having lived in this valley.
  bleak, bleak, bleak.
• 
  The Final Chapter

  Mid 3. The story of a nineteenth century engineer posted to oversee the removal of local inhabitants ahead of the flooding of their valley to create a reservoir is also a tale of an outsider finding solace in the presence of another who has had to return to this desolate spot due to personal tragedy. While witnessing the end of one community's attachment to such a stark landscape, he has to try and save the enigmatic Mary from the consequences of her own stark choice. Edric handles the story with aplomb but the reader still wishes the character of Charles Weightman lived up to his name.
• 
  Roberto

  This was the first time I read something from Robert Edric and I loved every page of it. In a setting reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, you could feel the anguish and doubt expressed the characters and the whole book is pervaded by a quiet sadness. Loved it.
• 
  Sarah

  5 stars for part 1, 4 stars for part 2 and 3 stars for the rest. The language is lovely and the idea and the place it is set in. However the tone was too unvaried and the end was too predictable. A bit like life perhaps, but luckily for me - not quite like my life.
• 
  Lucy J Jeynes

  Charles Weightman is appointed by the board to oversee the flooding of a valley that will form a new reservoir for Halifax. A lonely man, a lonely job, a lonely place.
• 
  Sheena

  Very moody. No real plot but lots of atmosphere.21
• 
  Beverly

  Dark and Bronte-esque.
• 
  Tom

  A chance purchase at the airport for a short flight back home, this book impressed me by the story and its psychological depth and absolutely gorgeous language. Great find!