Diane Setterfield’s atmospheric and entirely-charming new novel, Once Upon a River, released this week by Emily Bestler Books, takes place in the mid-19th century, an age suspended between Darwin and divination. The Swan is a village pub along the Thames where storytellers gather to rehearse and hone their craft. They shape the unwieldy truth into captivating narratives by trimming here and enhancing there, by assigning meaning and motive. So, when a severely beaten stranger stumbles into that pub one night, a lifeless young girl in his arms, it’s clear the literal truth of the matter will be hard to come by.
When the dead girl suddenly revives, she’s raised above the stuff of stories; she becomes the locus of every villager’s longings. Each character seems to have a competing, personal claim on her: She’s a local couple’s kidnapped child, taken by river gypsies and at last returned to her rightful home. She’s the long-dead sister of the vicar’s housemaid, a wish the old woman could never quite relinquish. She’s the rumored offspring of an upright farmer’s downright wicked son. She may even be the mythical daughter of Quietly, the ghost who punts the river at night, saving those whose time has not yet come and delivering the drowned to the netherworld.
With a sprawling, Dickensian cast of characters and a deft ear for language, Setterfield keeps us dangled between the storytellers’ fanciful world and the photographer’s literal rendering. Was the girl resurrected from the dead or can her case be explained by the local nurse’s experiments in hypothermia? Does the clairvoyant commune with the departed or is she just a gifted proto-therapist who knows the right questions to ask? Do spirits exist or are they conjured in a magic lantern show? From start to finish, Once Upon a River keeps us poised, deliciously, the way we all truly live: on that porous border between the mundane and the magical.
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