Sex, drugs and oozing chicken necks: this is the rock’n’roll lifestyle of the Shore, a lush bunch of islands off the Virginia coast where the characters of Sara Taylor’s ambitious debut subsist on extremes.
The 13 linked stories that make up The Shore feature death, birth, the promise of new life or the intention to take life away. Violence and primitive thinking reign in this convincingly vile redneck land.
From the opening chapter the reader is swept along from one unplanned pregnancy to the next, as a succession of women battle with men who are at worst rapists and murderers, at best moonshine-makers and sexually repressed.
A family tree at the beginning helps give shape to the sprawling and interconnected clans of the Shore. It doesn’t account for all of the characters, but the visual aid is welcome in a novel that spans 250 years.
The settings range from foremother Medora Slater’s brutal existence as the mixed-race child of a white landowner and a Shawnee servant in 1876 to a postapocalyptic society in 2143 where the misshapen Halfman Simian explains, in well-crafted pidgin English, his desire to break out of his assigned caste.
The narrative is nonlinear, beginning in 1995 with two young sisters, Chloe and Renee, who are pitted against their violent, meth-dealing father. With zero redeeming features, Bo contemplates whether, at 13, it’s too early to start prostituting Chloe, his elder daughter.
The landscape outside is equally dangerous, with the murder of a disturbed young boy, Cabel Bloxom, a source of gossip around the town and a major preoccupation for Chloe. We soon learn that she has good reason for her concerns, having caught Cabel trying to molest Renee in a clearing in the woods behind their house.
Chloe is an intriguing voice, feral and strong, taught by her mother Ellie how to shoot a gun when she was five. Ellie is no longer around to shepherd her daughters; the mystery of her absence becomes clear by the end of the chapter. The action unfolds quickly, leaving little time for wondering or suspense, but it gives an immediacy to the different eras as we are plucked and dropped from one danger to the next.
Taylor, a 24-year-old Virginian who was home-schooled before going on to complete a master’s in prose fiction at the University of East Anglia, switches styles in her fiction as easily she does time periods. It is no doubt one of the reasons she has been longlisted, along with four other debuts, for the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Ambiguous gender roles, grotesque situations and the whiff of decay hanging over the Shore – brilliantly imagined through the stench of chicken factories – lend a southern Gothic feel to the writing. There are sections of brutal realism, magic realism and speculative fiction. Other dystopias come to mind, notably David Mitchell's time-hopping epic Cloud Atlas, but also Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and its themes of sexually transmitted plagues and subjugation of women.
The form of the narrative recalls more recent works, such as Bilal Tanweer's debut of loosely interlinked stories, The Scatter Here Is Too Great, and Donal Ryan's altogether less dramatic portrayal of a fractured community in The Spinning Heart.
Taylor's book isn't quite as cohesive, with some chapters more compelling and convincing than others. Medora's story in Out of Eden and in Many Waters uses a formal tone appropriate to the era and has an interesting historical context, but the author's voice is evident in the descriptive passages and in the back story of the male characters.
Elsewhere all the names and details can confuse, as in Rain, where Sally, unusual in that she is a female character with a relatively happy life, talks us through the generations on both sides of her family.
The narrative is at its strongest when the women's predicaments are played out: in Boys Izzy endures the "soft-shelled crab feeling" of her husband having sex with her after a beating; the electrifying game of poker in Skirt and the sinking feeling of how it will end for Ellie, more affecting still as we have glimpsed her future; the plague-ridden world of 2037 in Talismans, where rotting reproductive organs have killed most of the country and yet Tamara is determined to give birth to a child alone.
As with everything else in this audacious debut, we are not spared the horror when she does: “They look like skinned plums, bright red and oozing and painful, not eyes at all . . . a third leg, bent up and wasted between the healthy two, and two sets of genitalia, one in the crotch of each pair of legs.”
