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Jim Crace: Signals of Distress
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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Jim Crace’s new novel, his fourth, Signals of Distress, takes a step backward in time from his 1991 novel, Arcadia, from the twentieth century to the nineteenth. Arcadia was anachronistic in many ways, a quasiallegoricaltaleoflifeanddeath ,aswellasarichdepictionoftwentiethcentury English commerce and culture, written in a style that seemed at odds with its more contemporary subjects. An award-winning En glish writer, Crace’s prose is lush, lyrical, out-of-its-time, but in Signals of Distress, it fits the never-never land of period reconstruction (early nineteenth century) quite well. The story’s premise is simple: two ships put into the small coastal English village of Wherrytown during a storm. One, a coastal steam packet, struggles into the harbor; the other, an ocean-traversing barque, is beat-up and beached on a sandbar. Aboard the coastal steam packet, Ha’porth of Tar, snug in the harbor ,isAlymerSmith,itsonlydebarkingpassengerandthenovel’schief protagonist. Alymer is a member of a solid, soap-producing family, Smith and Sons, and, after weathering the storm, he falls asleep and dreams, somewhat prophetically, of “kelp and some young country wife, ensnared and going down, with Alymer drowning in the girl, the girl sucked under by the weed, the weed pitchforked like hay on tines of sea and wind.” Jim Crace: Signals of Distress 245 246 Alymer “should have stayed at home instead of meddling abroad,” and “abroad” means down the English coast, away from the city. Sundry entanglements ensue. Alymer and the author lay open Wherrytown for us like a ripe fruit torn by an eager hand. Aboard the beached and injured ship, the Belle of Wilmington, is a crew of “Americans” and a slave cook, Otto, whom Alymer indulgently frees. The idea of Otto, more than Otto himself, galvanizes the citizenry and begins to become legendary. Crace writes historical fictions, and Signals of Distress shares a few contemporary antecedents (Hugh Nissenson’s Tree of Life, for one, Douglas Unger’s The Turkey War, another): history reimagined or viewed through a very late-twentieth-century microscope (or magnifying glass). What was it like? is answered, sort of, since the issues highlighted come from today’s headlines, not necessarily 1837’s. Yet,individualconsciousnessfromcenturiespastevaporatesmore quickly than does the architecture, or even the discovered remnants of what people ate once upon a time. How did they think? is still more of a puzzle than what they wore. And Crace is after more than that: he wants to illuminate how society creates itself, how it, early on, sends out its own signals of distress. And what does the late twentieth century want to know about the early nineteenth? According to Crace, we want to know how chamber pots are put to good use; how many guests share cramped quarters; how the soap industry makes use of technological advances, and deskills , and lays off long-term employees; how food is eaten and prepared ; how sex is carried off and endured; how wounds are dressed; how village life mends together and is controlled by a small trinity of people: minister, inn keeper, and hearty business-broker-about-town; how young girls acquire husbands and escape to the new world; how debts are paid, and revenge exacted. [54.210.126.232] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:21 GMT) 247 Crace is especially good at describing work, letting it and the novel ’s characters evolve simultaneously. Here the “Americans” are helping haul in a record catch of fish, pilchards, overseen by the village’s reigning businessman, Walter Howells, Wherrytown’s CEO: The Americans would not get any cash from Walter Howells. He regarded them as volunteers, free labour, and not worth a fourpenny fig between the lot of them, despite their noise and swaggering. They were too clumsy with the fish and were a hindrance rather than a help. They teased each other and flirted with the working women. The splashed their skirts, or dropped a pilchard down their apron fronts, or touched the younger and prettier women unnecessarily while they helped to put the baskets on their backs. The women, happy to be flirted with, on such a high and zesty day, carried the pilchards through the snow and sand up to the salting hall, next to Walter Howells’s house. Their baskets filled the lane, the yard, the courtway to the hall. Any living fish that jumped free of the baskets didn’t stand a chance. They suffocated on the icy air. Or they were scavenged by cats and gulls and by the little...