AS THE RIVER ONCE DID by Florence Sedge
A book review of Florence Sedge’s ‘As the River Once Did’ by O. Spaniel Murray
Sterling adjectival interloping prevails in the novels of Florence Sedge and her belated offering ‘As the River Once Did’ is not among exceptions. Bristling with furtive paragraphs, bloated with sticky gems, this is a novel for wanton and merry danglers, curving around the sullen array of contextual drip-alongs, wordy and imagistic. First, there is the river. Pretty wet. Then there’s what the river once did. It swings right into it by chapter three. As in the author’s other novels, the main player, Kate of the Innocent Ways, falls into the drab homage of lonely Sundays. That is, until she meets Dan, an expensive horse doctor, whose upstream abode is an interspersed mystery of dimensions. Unpredictably, Dan saves a Kenyan from drowning in the syrupy flood sludge. In comes Misty, the lady lawyer from the concrete jungle. It seems a mere contrivance, but skill belongs in narrative wrappings. By chapter nine you’re feeling the expectant deed.
There are several excellent adjectives underlining the plot’s molten haste and brown froth on the surface of the mellow waters. It kills a twisty response. The genre, we should admit, is structured like unto a formless resentment of nifty daring. We assume too much. Sedge lurks on the boundaries of gnarled exposition. Sometimes her prosaic flush uproots the splendid voyage of her telling. Sometimes the heroine appears unconvincing in the drapery of compromised longing. (Most chapters, by the way, start with the definite article.) By the end, the reader is bleeding with a tingling depth of torpor. Dan’s courage proves accidental. Kate comes to a conclusion. Sweeping waterscapes punctuate a story of hapless woe.
Like Charles Dibley’s ‘The Waterbirds Are Singing’ this is a gentle spring day broken by common violations. We are left wondering: Does life forget the transforming junctions? What is more a theme of these chunky tomes? ‘As the Rivers Once Did’ is not a muscly workout with robust stature, but it might, perforce, linger into dwellings of further insight. It grips the tiresome malingering of doubt that moves us all. Florence Sedge demonstrates again why she remains the salad’s crowning egg. Her verbs are slick and her participles brisk. Readers ought to dip into the rolling currents, skip all the stuff about the black shadows of symbolic dread, and go to the heart of tall things. It smashes through the bleak ennui of these troubled days.
- O. Spaniel Murray