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This month’s Book Club Choice is The Reed Flute by Tessa West. The author has written two novels. Her first, The Estuary published in 2002, was set in and around Bawdsey Manor on the banks of the river Deben during the 1953 floods and was the Book Club Choice last July. The Reed Flute was published two years later and like The Estuary it draws on the author’s love of the East Anglian landscape. Tessa has a website at www.tessawest.co.uk and I’m sure she won’t mind if I lift her summary of The Reed Flute from there.
“After long separate journeys, an Iraqi grandfather (Abbas) and his granddaughter (Khadija) arrive in England. They live with a relation in Great Yarmouth but find their new circumstances confusing and uncertain, causing the girl to take drastic action. In Norwich a widower is trying to build himself a new life, and his bird watching and oboe playing become routes to unexpected meetings and events. The Reed Flute vividly depicts a winter journey upstream along the bank of the Yare in which three main characters are nourished as much by the slow river and the subtle beauty of Broadland as by memory, hope and faith”.
A couple of weeks ago I walked along the Yare from Reedham to Polkey’s drainage mill and was reminded of the scene, set near Reedham, where Richard the Norwich widower sees the Iraqi couple for the second time. On my two hour long walk, to the mill and back, I met no one on the path and was accompanied only by a variety of bird life and at one place by a young deer. For those two hours that place was mine and I enjoyed it because I had a map and knew where I was. At one point I stopped to listen to the “that sound” of the wind in the reeds and imagined what it would have been like for Abbas and Khadija to be there be there with no map, no food, no shelter and with the winter light failing. The Reed Flute allowed me to see that landscape differently and appreciate again how an understanding of the spirit of a place is such an individual thing.
I would recommend The Reed Flute, not just because of the quality of the story but also because of the quality of the book’s production. The book is self published, not often in my experience necessarily a good thing, but this book is different. In the acknowledgements Tessa goes out of her way to thank Roland West for the “care and work he put into producing the cover, maps and illustrations” and I can’t agree more in fact I would have liked more illustrations. Also the cover, a close up photograph of a reed, is one of the most arresting I’ve seen in a bookshop for some time. Also the way in which the three individual narratives in the book are separated by personalised symbols is both delightful and very useful.
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