#amreading Five Rivers met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris

"There once was a boy who had a story to tell but couldn't bring himself to tell it"

Every now and then a novel comes along that you immediately want to discuss with friends.   With these books the quiet and solitary experience of reading leads quickly to a need to talk; about characters, about locations and about new authors. This is social reading at its best.

Five Rivers met on a Wooded Plain is the debut novel from playwrite Barney Norris who saw success with his 2014 play Visitors. The novel is set in Norris's home town of Salisbury in Wiltshire and features the lives of five ordinary people brought together by one extraordinary event. 

The novel's epigraph is a quotation from George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2); 'We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual' which perfectly sets up this new 'Study of Provincial Life' set not in a fictitious town like Middlemarch but in a very real town, Salisbury, which Norris expertly casts as a small but enigmatic place with its ancient cathedral spire, mythical Old Sarum and the large yet secretive presence of the Military. 

We are introduced to each character in turn as the narrative unfolds around a car crash that occurs in the town centre. First up is Rita a local flower seller and part time drug dealer. Norris writes each part in the first person which perfectly captures both the confessional revelations along with the profound routine of everyday life. In the next chapter we meet Chris, a young man dealing with love and death for the first time. Through Sam we meet security guard Liam whose story features in the next chapter; in each section Norris provides a new perspective on the accident and the connections that each character has with the others. By the time we meet George, the driver of the car, we're slap bang in the heart of the community as if we'd lived there all our lives.

Five Rivers is a cleverly constructed novel with thoughtfully and well crafted characters from a writer who can so effortlessly get under the skin of the kinds of people we all know. The novel is brilliantly imaginative yet deeply routed in the everyday and I can't wait to read more from this exciting writer.

I read this novel on kindle in April 2016 mostly between Oxfordshire and Southwark.

Five Rivers met on a Wooded Plain by Barney Norris, published by Doubleday, 285 pages