Once Upon a River

Tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in the quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings--mysterious, unknowable things--but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.

On a midwinter night, a stranger bursts into the Swan, an inn at Radcot along the Thames, with a dead girl in his arms. She is unquestionably lifeless, but later she takes a breath and returns to life. Our story seems to begin here with the mystery of the drowned girl who came back from death, but in fact we will as much need to travel upstream closer to the source of several stories, rather than downstream to the end of the mystery, before we get to the bottom of this enigma.

This book was written masterfully. The wistful late-Victorian world (I'm guessing) is brought to life on the page, and it inspires your imagination with a particularly muted and earthy colour palette. The fantasy here isn't particularly in your face, it's really just the barest touch, but it's enough to infuse the entire story with a certain charm of the unknown - are certain things merely just superstition repeated by rural farmers who don't know better and which can be explained away with science, or is there really some kind of magic at work here? I'm usually a pretty impatient reader and skim a lot, but this book made me slow down a little and eat up as much of the details and words as I could.



The mystery itself was gripping enough for this to be a binge read for me. It wasn't exactly a thriller, but the core of the story was refreshingly different, centering around a strange little girl who apparently came back from the dead, and who seems to belong to everyone but no one at the same time.

The character work was beautiful too - we are introduced to some of the vilest characters that you will wish to personally drown in the Thames, and also some of the sweetest ones (Robert Armstrong was hands down the best character in this entire novel, closely followed by his pig Maud - I would've cried and thrown this book at the wall if anything had happened to them). You witness how downright disgusting people can be to each other (the way Victor Nash treated Lily White really riled me up) but you also see how much kindness and sweetness some humans are capable of (Robert Armstrong's parents were just... so good. They didn't end up together, and as a result he led a pretty fractured and ostracised childhood and life, but they both did as much as they could by him, and the story went on a much happier trajectory than it could have otherwise gone; same with the way he loved and did his best by Bess).

Overall, a surprisingly beautiful read that promises mystery, romance, and emotions of every colour.

How to tell a good story is at the heart of Diane Setterfield's Once Upon A River. She sets her action in and around a tavern called The Swan, set along the Thames River in a generically old-timey version of England. This tavern, you see, is famous for its storytellers. One dark midwinter's night, when there are just a few people left at the tavern telling each other tales, there's a great commotion at the door. A man bursts in, bloodied and bruised, holding what at first seems to be a doll. Upon closer inspection, she's revealed to be a little girl, beautiful but dead. Her vitals are checked by Rita, a local medic of sorts, but there's no hope...until suddenly her heart begins to beat again, and her chest to rise and fall with breath. However, she does not respond to any questions about her provenance.

Three families believe she could be theirs: Helena and Anthony Vaughn, a young couple whose little daughter was kidnapped and never recovered; Robert and Bess Armstrong, who believe the child could be the hidden offspring of their wayward son Robin; and strange, lonely Lily, who thinks the child could be her long-lost little sister. The girl silently accepts being initially placed with the Vaughns, and while Helena is ecstatic, convinced that this is her own child returned to her, Anthony remains skeptical. And Rita, who has long lived alone, finds herself drawn closer and closer to the girl she continues to monitor as she also helps the photographer who brought the girl into their lives recuperate. The tension between what all of these people want to believe and the truth keeps growing as the real history of the girl continues to elude everyone, until (of course) the stirring climax.

There's magical realism here, which isn't always my favorite, but it's applied with a light and nimble touch, serving the greater emotional truth of the story. And in a book focused on storytelling and the ways that a well-told story can entrance a reader, you're conscious of the emotional manipulation going on, but it's done so well and so satisfyingly that it doesn't matter. It feels very much like a fairy tale, with characters who manage to both be broad enough to be recognizable as archetypes and specific enough to get invested in. And there are callbacks to classic literature (Great Expectations comes particularly to mind) that add to the pleasure for the reader familiar with them, but aren't necessary to understanding or enjoying the book.

Setterfield's prose and plot work beautifully together to grab and keep attention. I honestly found it difficult to put down, but when I did and then picked it back up, it was easy to get reoriented and swept back up in it. If you're someone who's driven batty by a failure to get all plot points resolved, be warned that this book does wind up with some ambiguities. For my part, I thought it was refreshing to have a little mystery left. I really loved reading this and would highly recommend it to all audiences, it's a wonderful book that I think would have a lot of appeal to a wide variety of readers.