Perfect Fusion

Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Every so often, without planning for it, reading can offer a wonderful package of one's own personal experience finding echoes and fresh insight through the prism of someone else's imagination. So it was when I opened 'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain', a book handed to me by my excellent local bookshop owner as one that I might find 'interesting'. His recommendations seldom disappoint, but I had no idea that the themes of this unusual and beautifully constructed novel would catapult me back into my own childhood, since the part of England on which Barney Norris focuses is Salisbury, where I went to school for several years as a teenager.

'Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain' is one of those books that defies easy categorisation. It has the momentum and tight energy of poetry, but reads as smoothly as the most accessible fiction. It is about the lives of five people who do not know each other - a flower-seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard and a widower - who all live in and around the ancient environs of Salisbury. Barney Norris's descriptions of this part of the world - which he clearly knows and loves himself - are compelling. He takes us back to the converging of the five rivers all those thousands of years ago, to the town that sprang up on the plain as a result, and to the construction of the mighty cathedral, still the glorious focal point of the town today. It was a joy for me to be taken back and given new insights into a place I had once known so well, though the power of Norris's writing needs no familiarity for its magic to work.


As the five stories gather pace, it becomes apparent that the protagonists' very different lives are to be connected not just by this shared geography and history, but by the tragedy of a car accident, as unavoidable as the wending paths of the rivers round which they pursue their lives. The progression of the narrative to this dreadful climax is gripping. Yet Norris also manages to illuminate the hopes that can defy such catastrophe and despair. As the denouement unfolds, it is to the beauty and mystery that lie at the heart of every human endeavour that our eye is drawn. Even in the midst of great loss Norris helps us see the redeeming power of love and the envigorating prospect of what the future may yet hold. Best of all was how all the themes of the novel - water, life, human ingenuity and resilience - came together, fusing so beautifully that by the end it was impossible to separate them.





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