Ron Charles
During periods of drought, the remains of stone buildings still rise above the surface of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall's incantatory prose might call them forth again, too.
— The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Mardale, the remote British hamlet where Hall's remarkable debut novel is set, is a close-knit community of tenant farmers "where grand events and theatrical schemes rarely take place." So when a handsome stranger arrives in 1936, suspicions run high among the hardworking villagers. Jack Liggett is up-front about his plans for Mardale: he has come to inform the villagers that their homes would soon be at the bottom of a massive reservoir. According to Liggett, the dam associated with the project will be a "wonderful piece of architecture and engineering." But the villagers, who view the project as "so strange and vast that at first it was not taken seriously," resist, setting off a losing struggle between the insular community and the modern world. Caught in the middle is Janet Lightburn, the daughter of a local farmer, who begins a tempestuous and tragic romance with Jack. A Booker Prize finalist for her second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, (published in the U.S. in 2005), Hall is a talented writer, and though U.S. readers may have trouble with the phonetically rendered dialogue ("Twa Pund. Eh? Yan more ootstanding' "), the story, with its undertones of loss and grief, tugs at the heart. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A doomed loved story played out against the planned destruction of an English rural community. This first novel by British author Hall (her Booker-shortlisted The Electric Michelangelo was published in the US in 2005) uses a real episode-the building of the Haweswater dam in Westmorland in the 1930s-as the foundation for a two-pronged elemental tragedy. The book itself is an ode to the Lakeland in the UK, its fells, gray stone walls and people, and many of its pages are devoted to descriptions of place, season, occupation and weather-especially rain. Heartbreak hangs in the air from the moment the village of Mardale learns of its imminent annihilation, the result of the Manchester City Waterworks building a vast dam and drowning the whole valley. Devout Ella Lightburn and her stoic husband, World War I veteran Samuel, are typical of the stolid local tenant farmers shortly to be dispossessed of home and livelihood, although their children-headstrong, feline Jan and water-obsessed Isaac-have something otherworldly about them. Fiery Jan will fall intensely for the overseer of the dam project, Jack Liggett, "a man she is required to hate above all others." When he falls and dies while hiking, with her left behind pregnant, she turns demented, tearing at herself in despair, eventually committing suicide with stolen explosives. Isaac grows up to be a diver and elects to drown in the reservoir. Hall paints her scenes in dark, symbolic, sometimes overwrought prose, straining for mythic overtones. Her desperate love story, occasionally reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, staggers under the tragic load heaped upon it; the sad dispersal of the village and its traditional way of life is more affecting.A portentous debut, but this winner of the Commonwealth Best First Novel Award is proof of a literary talent with more to come.
