Seascraper (2025)
Why this one?
We are into Booker Prize Longlist season. Since (as is fairly typical) I’ve read none of the longlisted books, I am embarking on my usual casual exploration at this stage, probably aiming to read a handful of the longlist before getting more serious with the shortlist when it’s announced. This one had popped up on my radar a little before the announcement, and I was also heading off to the seaside for a few days, so it felt somewhat appropriate to kick things off with.
Benjamin Wood (1981- ; active 2012- ) was born in Merseyside, England. He left school during his A Levels to pursue a career in music as a singer-songwriter. After a time, he returned to study, initially studying media practice at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, where he started writing fiction. He then attended the University of British Columbia, Canada on a Commonwealth Scholarship for an MFA in Creative Writing. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College, London, and lives in Surrey.
His first novel, The Bellwether Revivals (2012), which drew on his experiences as a young musician, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Prix du Roman Fnac. He has published three subsequent novels, the most recent of which was 2022’s The Young Accomplice, which was broadcast in serialised form on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. Seascraper is his fifth novel and first to be longlisted for the Booker.
Thoughts, etc.
Seascraper begins by introducing us to Thomas Flett, a young man in a Northern English coastal town in the 1960s who works in the seemingly already slightly anachronistic profession of a “shanker”, using a horse and cart to collect shrimp in often hazardous conditions from a beach littered with “sinkpits”. He lives with his mother, who had him as a teenager and has been shunned by the local community. She relies on him to earn money, which he does through his unsociable, repetitive and physically exhausting work.
His father was an older teacher, who was exiled from the local community and moved south before signing up to the military and losing his life in the war. He was taught his profession and limited life lessons by his grandfather, now also recently deceased. Into this void of role models (especially of the male kind) steps a mysterious American, a film director who says he wants to shoot on the beach where Thomas works, and employ him as a guide.
The book begins largely in the mould of a historical mood-piece. We’re thrown straight into Thomas’ work, which appears to dominate his life, with only brief interludes of a tense and claustrophobic home life with his demanding and unpredictable mother to break things up. It takes a little time to place the book historically: the work Thomas does feels like it belongs to an even older time, aided by the use of specialist dialect words that feel obscure to the casual reader and even seemingly to those around Thomas who are not in his world. We learn later that he is not typical even of his local community - the sound of his horse’s hooves announces that it can only be him. As a character he also feels somewhat ageless, even old, until the fog lifts a little and we start to situate him as a young man in the 1960s, but one who could not be more adrift from the ‘swinging’ sixties of the popular imagination.
This first section is already engrossing, beautifully written and hugely evocative of another time, and within that, a man also somewhat out of that time. The arrival of Edgar Acheson at Thomas’ doorstep swings the book into a different gear. Suddenly, here is a glamorous and garrulous American with tales of Hollywood, bearing decadent meat-based gifts and a promise of a reward far in excess of that Thomas receives from his daily toil. Thomas is intrigued enough to take him up on his offer, and soon forms an intriguing kind of friendship with the visitor. Edgar’s enthusiastic tales of creative passion stir in him a sense of the world beyond his doorstep, and an that his secretive passion for playing folk music in his bedroom on his battered guitar could be something more than just an idle pastime.
The book has more surprises to come, including a spectacularly rendered near-death ‘dream’ sequence in which Thomas’ creative potential is further unlocked, and a denouement that we expect to crush Thomas’ new ambition but instead causes him to double down. It’s all highly compelling stuff, as extravagantly cinematic as the overreaching ideas of Edgar in places, but staying as firmly grounded as Thomas’ roots throughout. It is in many ways telling a story we have heard before - a kind of coming of age or awakening for a young working class character who suddenly has his creative potential unlocked by an external instigating force or character - but it’s the way in which it goes about telling that tale that makes Seascraper so magical and memorable. In its relatively few pages we see a kind of reverse aging in Thomas, as he first sinks as deep as it’s possible to go into his treacherous, inhospitable landscape and with that immersion gains a new understanding of his own history, before then emerging almost reborn, a new man with endless possibilities on the horizon.
Score
9.5
A really beautiful short novel that I can very much see resonating with a wider audience. It would sit perfectly on a Booker shortlist, and while I’ve read nothing else yet for comparison, I’d still love to see it on there!
Next up
Something else from the longlist…
