Deservedly longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, the beautiful and evocative Seascraper by Benjamin Wood tells the story of Thomas Flett, a young man living in an English coastal community in the mid-twentieth century. His days consist of drizzle and drudgery, dragging for shrimp on the beaches, a gruelling job that is wrecking his body. Its almost succeeded in claiming his spirit too, except for one tiny flickering flame that Thomas nurtures when he sings and plays guitar. When an American movie director improbably shows up in his village, Thomas is offered a chance of reinvention, if only he can break free from the shackles of his past.
In his grandpa’s day, the shankers as they were known, rode out in their horse and carts, a clip-clopping procession of twelve. These days,Thomas is the last one left, his contemporaries having moved to more lucrative beaches with motorised rigs. It’s just Thomas and his horse, day in, day out (and evenings too if Ma thinks his catch is too small).
Sometimes he thinks the graft and sheer loneliness will finish him off. Grandpa used to tell him that ‘providing is surviving’, but lately Thomas has come to realise that he’s settling for too little. What he really wants is to be a musician and songwriter, to share his music with the world. When enigmatic film director, Edgar Acheson, appears on his doorstep looking to shoot some atmospheric foggy beach scenes, Thomas is offered a bit part. Beguiled and inspired, he steps into a drama where nothing is quite as it seems.
If Seascraper were merely a sepia-toned portrait of an unfulfilled life, it would still be a wonderful novel, but there are twists, turns and layers to this tale which render it enthralling.
At the heart of the tale is a father-shaped hole. Thomas and Ma eke out an existence in a community that actively ignores them, neighbours his mother once knew well, who decline to acknowledge her or her son. Gleaning clues from his late grandpa, Thomas had come to understand that his father brought shame and humiliation upon the family. Now long dead, his ghost lingers throughout, awaiting a final reckoning.
Acheson is the catalyst, a charming visionary, whose enthusiasm for his art sparks a corresponding ambition in Thomas. Keen to start planning some key scenes for his movie and in need of Thomas’s intimate knowledge of the beaches, he asks to be taken out on the cart one evening. The aesthetic possibilities are just so exciting, lantern light in the gloom, the rattle of the horse’s harness, and something else, waiting for them in the swirling mists.
Rich in detail and glorious imagery, Seascraper gives us a young man whose ‘dreams are full of slag heaps made from rotting shrimp’, arms him with a shovel and sets him to work, ‘trying to clear a path’ to an alternative future.
A gloriously unpredictable and affecting novel, complemented by a beautiful book cover by Jonathan Pelham (incorporating reference material from Getty Images).
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood is published by Viking, 176 pages.
