By Alison Armstrong.
Adam Farrer, Cold Fish Soup (Saraband, 2022)
I had been waiting to read Adam Farrer’s Cold Fish Soup for some time, anticipating its arrival since hearing it had won the NorthBound book prize last July. It has been described as a ‘love song’ to Withernsea, and this in itself was enough to cause intrigue — a town where I spent five all-too-formative years and also because I am working on my own book about the eroding edge of East Yorkshire. From Bridlington to Spurn Point, much of the coastline is disappearing into the sea, and has been doing so at an alarming rate since records began. The area was once an enormous bay and was formed from boulder clay and debris deposited by the retreating ice at the end of the last Ice Age. The clay is prone to breakage and towns, villages, hamlets topple over the edge. At eighteen, I couldn’t wait to leave the place, but in the last decade have found myself hankering after the whole landscape; drawn by those lost places, and those that wait for their own obsolescence.
Cold Fish Soup, described as a memoir in essays, begins with an account of effortless suicide, an account of potentially committing suicide by waiting for the ground, the fragile boulder clay, to give way beneath your feet. This sets up the sardonic tone of the book, which, along with a finely balanced tenderness for the place and people makes up the default emotional register of the book, allowing for an exploration of life events — separation, suicide, early death of a sibling, a dying father and a hopeless dog — to be done in Farrer’s own terms, negotiating his relationship to language along the way. As such, it is an honest and authentic portrait not only of a town disappearing into the sea, but also of his family and friendships. At the beginning of the book is an account of a Christmas dinner at Withernsea Golf Club: it captures the peculiar joylessness that only a down-at-heel small town can offer the seriously depressed. A writer would be hard-pressed to detonate the despair felt by the depressed return to family following a break-up better than in Withernsea Golf Club with its menu constructed in sizes — ‘we do medium, large and extra-large.’ ‘Extra-large is not a meal size,’ he writes. ‘It’s the size of underwear I buy.’ His mother tells him, she has a three-pack of pants for him that his father didn’t want. ‘”Well, that’s something to look forward to,” I said, as we settled ourselves down at the table. Then I realised that it actually was, my future hopes bound up in the promise of rejected underpants.’
Farrer carves a carefully balanced line between humour and pathos; the writer is often in pursuit of the quirky and odd — werewolves in Bempton, hunters of the paranormal, extra-terrestrial beings. It turns out that the area is known for its UFO sightings, and one of the joys of the book for me is that I had hitherto been oblivious to these facts of the area, though it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that in areas where nothing ever happens UFOs become as likely as anything else, and in cases of extreme boredom are actively sought. Farrer himself writes, ‘I often felt a sense of tedium so crushing it was as if the town was subject to its own peculiarly intense force of gravity’.
Farrer adopts a dying dog and describes her, ‘A first draft you just want to leave unchanged. She’s barrel shaped with stumpy legs and pig-pink skin, visible through an off white coat that moults away… lop-sided dog that can barely stay upright.’ A lockdown substitute for a sick father he can no longer access, his friend suggests. References to lockdown are also understatedly poignant, appropriate to the ubiquity of shared isolation, but somehow searingly tender. Describing the closed shop fronts of the high street during the pandemic: ‘We wandered down the atrophied high street, where every closed and shuttered storefront looked dead and brittle somehow, as if, had I reached out to touch one, it would have crinkled and flaked like dry leaves. But I didn’t, because no one touched anything anymore’. Meanwhile, it has been decided that Withernsea’s lighthouse be kept lit during lockdown, as a beacon of hope for the town, though the building itself is kept closed — ‘The light on but nobody home’.
Adam Farrer is a writer with a wry eye for details and a capacity of phrase that occasionally reaches the sublime — describing the eroding edge, ‘when the graveyards fell, skeletons appeared on the cliff face, poking out like chunks of hazelnut in a chocolate bar’. It is a gem of a book, an unflinching look at Withernsea, the lure of the seaside town for the hopeless: ‘People whose lives have crumbled often move to the seaside in the hope of recapturing their lives when they were at their best. They remember cliches of day trips, potent sense memories. Uncomplicated, sun-soaked family times’. The reality is ‘poverty, economic uncertainty and lack of opportunities were driving people to substance abuse and depression…’. He describes the future of Withernsea as ‘tightening like a noose’. A certain type of writer, myself included, is pulled to all that is defective, unloved, hopeless, seeing in these things a truer sense of the world; believing that those parts doomed to be forgotten and passed over hold the larger truths of our lives. The mundane fabric that writes white; the unseen work of life whose fate is to be forgotten.
A particular highlight for me was the description of the brief conversations with the author’s mother, who displays her defiant love of life through her eccentric relation to it, delighting no doubt in her own ability to shock the pessimistic-leaning, and slightly embarrassed, sensibilities of her son. The interchabges are characteristically short. Seemingly superficial and full of mock irritation, yet belying a depth of love and care as each manoeuvres in awareness and defiance of their shared family tragedy — ‘then Robert died and it felt like he had used up our family’s one free early-death-pass’: ‘We were each branded by his death, marked for life’. He concludes the eighth essay in this way: ‘If we were going to insist on standing here at the end of the world, there was no embracing it. We had to keep stepping back from the ever-approaching edge and hold each other fast’.
I am unmusical and lost heart in the music chapter/essay — it was perhaps too authentically done, it hit home with memories of boys endured at Withernsea High School and beyond, nursing ambitions, quietly and otherwise, to become their own musical legends. For me, the real pleasure of this book was in the tender portrait of family. The mix of eccentricity and banality that lies at the heart of every family, the nuanced details of family relations and place in the family structure, the distinctive family lexicon, the way every family harbours within itself its own dictionaries and grammar, its definitive and peculiar logic, it own way of seeing the world and negotiating its survival within it. This is how a family forges on with its identity, protects itself against the world in the way that groynes protect the land from the sea. How language itself becomes key to coping with tragedy, circling the contours of it to get closer to the truth of a person lost. It seemed strange at first that a family grieving for the suicide of the eldest son would sometimes make glib references to suicide, until Farrer placed it within context of his family’s linguistics: ‘We use the language of death and suicide flippantly, like it doesn’t scare us. If we took it seriously, we might have to stop and think of Robert and of how we were all too late to save him. So, we joke, look on the bright side, talk to angels, chastise each other and make light as if we’re not fearful’. Our way of speaking contains and defines us, shores us up to better deal with what life has in store for us.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Alison Armstrong has poems, essays and stories published in magazines and anthologies. Her first novel Fossils was published by Saraband Books in April 2022. She produced her first play, Lost Voices of Morecambe Winter Gardens in 2021, which won a Royal Society of Literature, Literature Matters Award in 2020. Her short fiction has been shortlisted in Harper’s Bazaar Short Fiction Prize and the Bridport Prize and in 2017 won a Northern Writers’ Award. Her nonfiction was longlisted for the Nan Shepherd Prize 2019. She lives and works as a waitress, cleaner and painter in Lancaster.
