Love's wilder shore

Erica Wagner's Seizure swims through intense and poetical waters - with seals, says Alfred Hickling
Seizure by Erica Wagner
Buy Seizure at the Guardian bookshop Public domain


by Erica Wagner

226pp, Faber, £10.99

London-based city planner Janet travels to seal-sighting country after her solicitor informs her that she has inherited her mother's remote coastal cottage in the north of England.

Janet - who has resisted marrying her violinist partner and reads funding reports in bed - is not what you'd call a passionate woman. Yet since childhood she has been prone to strange seizures: temporary lapses of consciousness which give her the foreboding sense of "being imprisoned within the echo of disaster". These feelings come to the fore in the rough landscape around the cottage, where she is alarmed by the sight of the seals, "thick, tapering cylinders of fur" with "abyssal eyes".

Janet has good reason to believe she is being watched, as a strange man has been spying on her from the sand dunes since her arrival. He approaches, makes small talk, then reveals that he possesses a copy of her key. You may think that the sensible response to a stalker who has taken possession of your home would be to scream and phone the police, but Janet feels a compelling connection to the intruder - so compelling that within a few pages they have tempestuous sex and go swimming with the seals.

As literary editor of The Times, Wagner was a persuasive voice in the discovery of novelist Jon McGregor and his If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, so you might feel a need to brace yourself for a certain amount of febrile prose-poetry and wanton onomatopoeia. Whereas the great stylists make it seem effortless, her style is more like that of a fashion editor forced to choose between so many fabulous designs she decides to wear them all at once.

At times she chooses to be obliquely epigrammatic: "Love that lengthens, thins. How many truces until the last truce is reached? If there is truce, has there been war?" At others, she becomes gushingly metaphorical: "Now the flower was pulled from her grasp and petals, shrieking their red terror, fled all around, scattering."

She can tell a story: the main action is interspersed with a parallel narrative about restless hunters, abandoned children and mysterious seal-women. But when she moves into interior-monologue mode the attention starts to drift: "How many words had she heard over the years? She wondered if it was possible to count. Every a, every of, every this. Pouring through her head, a river of language, listening, she was always listening, always attentive, always waiting for the single word, the chain of words, that would change things, solve the problem." Such close attention to words is as problematic for a writer as it is for a builder to become rather too fascinated with bricks - you can't fault the craftsmanship, but it takes an awfully long time to get the house finished.

Wagner maintains this histrionic pitch with such doggedness it acquires a certain integrity. There's no fault in attempting to write passionately or poetically, yet such a style demands extreme levels of rigour and self-control if the reader is not to be overwhelmed by the surging river of language.