Winchelsea. By Alex Preston. Canongate Books; 352 pages; £14.99
IN 18TH-CENTURY ENGLAND, free commerce meant a high-stakes gamble towards the legal guidelines and forces of the state. Nicely-armed and cruel, gangs of smugglers cowed, or recruited, seafaring communities alongside the southern coasts. These “free merchants” outwitted excise collectors to land and promote untaxed cargoes of wine, spirits, tea or luxurious materials introduced secretly from France and the Low International locations. Their deeds, usually sanitised, handed into folklore, thence into the swashbuckling style of Victorian fiction that Alex Preston’s new novel enjoyably revives.
Till its last acts, his ingenious and entertaining yarn unfolds within the 1740s round Winchelsea in Sussex—now a picturesque village, then a decayed port, honeycombed beneath with contraband-friendly caves. Mr Preston bows to his literary ancestors, akin to J. Meade Falkner and Robert Louis Stevenson, however pulls the smugglers’ story updated. Goody Brown, his intrepid if conscience-stricken protagonist, yearns for a “full and unconstrained” life, freed from the shackles of her intercourse. By means of galloping, cross-dressing adventures she does justice to an “inside self” that, gender-wise, feels “neither one factor nor one other”.
When her father is murdered by his fellow brigands after a suspected betrayal, Goody and her brother Francis choose to affix an much more formidable native energy, the Hawkhurst Gang—drawn from historical past, as is its bloody downfall. Adopted, like his sister, Francis has been rescued by a fortunate shipwreck from a lifetime of slavery. In smuggling exploits on land and sea, the siblings press thrillingly near “the damaging fringe of issues” (a favorite phrase of Graham Greene’s). But for all her bravado in scraps with hapless troopers, or on “guinea runs” to pilfer international gold, Goody’s gnawing unease about her behaviour grows. Her guilt complicates and darkens a narrative filled with well-crafted motion scenes.
The story is informed with exhilarating color, aptitude and tempo. If Goody’s “mongrel file of a hybrid life” edges near realism—in episodes of being pregnant and childbirth, or its unblinking eye on the cruelty of smuggling clans—it quickly units sail once more on the excessive seas of romance. On one stage “Winchelsea” is a pastiche of a pastiche: a tribute to century-old revivals of Georgian prose. However Goody’s “wondrous and fantastical” story takes readers into surprising territory, together with a foray to the Scottish Highlands, the doomed revolt of 1745 and a neighbouring literary style, the Jacobite journey romp. Mr Preston wears his tricorne hat with panache. ■
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