Everything I Found on the Beach

Cynan Jones is a talented young Welsh writer and this is the second of his books I have read after [b:The Dig|19102837|The Dig|Cynan Jones|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1386012144s/19102837.jpg|27135563]. Once again, this is spare, bleak, poetic and visceral, and once again he is inhabiting the minds of people on the borders of society facing elemental struggles.

The book opens with a body being found on the beach, with wounds that suggest foul play, but we only discover its significance much later in the book.

The two main characters are Grzegorz, a Polish immigrant who works in an abattoir and is desperate to find enough money to move his young family out of an overcrowded shared house, and Holden (Hold) whose little money comes show more from fishing and shooting rabbits - he dreams of owning his own boat and creating a better life for his dead best friend's widow and her son.

Both are driven to take risks involving drug dealers to pursue these ambitions, and there is never much hope for either of them. What rescues the book from bleak savagery is the language, Jones's feeling for its Welsh coastal landscape and the depth of his characterisation, which includes giving equal weight to the thoughts of the Irish thugs hired by the drug dealers.

Like The Dig, this is a vividly realised story but not one for the easily shocked. show less

Another book by Cynan Jones that I couldn’t put down on account of his unique phrasing and pace and his ability to conjure intense, relatable moments from his Everyman characters’ lives. This book focuses simultaneously on two men’s lives and their desire to improve their stations in totally different ways, and how their stories crash into one another through a random encounter.

The first man, Hold, is a journeyman fisherman, renting an old fishing boat, setting lobster traps and shore-based fish nets to earn a modest income. He lives in a trailer somewhere on the coast of Wales. His best friend has died three years earlier and he feels duty-bound to help care for his widow and her young son. He’s not sure of his place in their show more lives, or of his role—part duty, part desire.

The second man, Grzegorz, is an immigrant from Poland, with a wife and two young sons, living in public assistance somewhere in Great Britain. He’s a meat butcher by trade, but gets mixed up in some drug-running to find a way out of his poverty for his family.

One night while out rabbit hunting, Hold makes his way to the beach to pull in his nets and finds an inflatable raft drifting to shore, with the dead body of Grzegorz aboard. While pulling him to shore, he finds packages of cocaine on board, the man’s mobile phone, and while being battered by the waves he makes a decision that, since the phone still works, he will get the drugs to their final destination — and the payout can set his friend’s widow and son on a better course.

That is the entirety of the plot but the descriptive power of Jones’ sparse style is a force and we are brought along with Hold through the ceaseless tension of what will happen next.

Though completely foreign to most of our life experiences, there is nothing farcical or unbelievable about this or any of Jones’ stories. What I can relate to here is the feelings he attributes to his characters from moment to moment about their banal inner dialogues and how they make their decisions. Most relatable for me is how the landscape and weather and surroundings come alive, as if also characters, under Jones’ pen.

I started this novella on a quick work trip to Florida and finished it in a few days. I will read anything Cynan Jones writes. He is a magician of the simple, the direct, the efficient, the evocative. I’ve also enjoyed his books The Long Dry and The Dig. show less

Takes a while to get going and this one is nowhere near as good as his others, which I loved.