“The deadening of the sea as the weight of the storm rolled in, a deep disconcerting inhalation of the sky.” The forces of nature know how to make themselves heard in Caryl Lewis’s new novel. Drift is an original and timely story about the impact of war set against an unusual backdrop of an isolated coastal town in Wales.
When the storm clears, “waves rippled guiltily this morning, their energy lost, the breeze gentle and even. Apologetic. Contrite. Like a man the morning after beating his wife.” It is a startling, apposite metaphor, a good example of Lewis’s attentive prose style, that also works to summarise the novel’s dramatic tension, the opposition of nature and manmade violence, the great clash that will play out over the course of the narrative.
Lewis tells the story of multiple characters, but the central focus of Drift is on Nefyn, a young Welsh woman with mysterious powers who finds the body of a Syrian refugee, Hamza, washed ashore after the storm. As she nurses him back to life, they learn about each other’s pasts and fall in love. All the while they plot Hamza’s escape from the town and nearby army base where he was being held as a prisoner-of-war on suspicion of terrorist associations, before mistreatment by certain guards resulted in his being dumped at sea.
Early sections show the reader the brutality of prison life, where the casual violence of the guards and the hopelessness borne out of years of stasis, the endless purgatory, ultimately cause Hamza to go on hunger strike. In contrast, Nefyn’s strange hideaway house offers hope and a chance of redemption.
Lewis switches narrative perspectives with ease and the various subplots are woven skilfully together
Drift is an ode to different cultures, specifically Hamza’s war-torn Syria and Nefyn’s indigenous Welsh heritage. Each chapter begins with a word in three languages – Welsh, Arabic, English – the order depending on the ensuing action: “Hikma, Wisdom, Doethineb … Squall, ‘asfa, Tymestl … Needle, Nodwydd, ‘iibra.”
It is a nice touch, reflective of Lewis’s attention to detail, and of her own writing background as an award-winning novelist, children’s author, playwright and screenwriter in the Welsh language. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco is regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature. The book is on the Welsh curriculum and the film adaptation, also written by Lewis, won six Welsh Baftas as well as the Spirit of the Festival Award at the Celtic Media Festival.
Drift, her first novel in English, is the story of how two people, two languages and two cultures can be a source of love, not friction. Lewis switches narrative perspectives with ease and the various subplots are woven skilfully together.
Characterisation is equally deft. We meet career lieutenants off to black-tie balls in the senior mess, thickset guards whose tongues are sharp with ambition, Nefyn’s surly brother Joseph, and a kind neighbour, Efa, who is losing her husband to dementia. This storyline is delineated in remarkably few strokes, the pain of dementia a sad echo of an earlier pain in the marriage, namely infertility, where “their failure had turned to sadness, and sadness to silence”.
There is a mythic quality to the novel, both in the heroism of ordinary people in the face of power, and the character of Nefyn, with her folkloric affinity to the sea. These mysteries are revealed slowly and delicately, lending them credibility. Nefyn’s powers are initially underplayed, in a way that makes them strangely believable. Other books that come to mind are How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus and the surreal stories of the Scottish writer Kirsty Logan, who uses myth to great effect in her fiction. There are also shades of Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea and Sarah Hall’s recent novel Burntcoat, which had an immigrant love story at its centre.
As with Burntcoat, the reality of war for civilians is painfully clear in Drift. Hamza’s wife was killed by a stray bullet, his child is missing, his extended family dispersed. Hamza himself has spent nine years as a prisoner in different camps, with no hope of an ending: “[He] had been moved. For years. From Syria to Oman, from Oman onwards. Moved and moved so that he had become so far removed from where he had been, who he had been, that he no longer knew himself. Cells. Trucks. Boats. Each country complicating his story.”
A former map-maker, Hamza seems uniquely placed to discuss the topography of modern conflict, the greed behind it. In one of the book’s many moving passages, he tells Nefyn that the real horror of war is that it rubs out families, tradition, kindness, joy, making people’s lives invisible.
Drift is a valiant effort to write back against that horror, to show the resilience of the human spirit, the tenacity and love that helps us survive.
