Book Review: Storm by Alex Hubbard

Niall Griffiths

Ah, Aberystwyth. He was born on a dangerous rock. Liminal, between the mountains and the sea. Next parish, New York (if you’re around Ireland). Inland, the green desert of the Cambrians (in Harri Webb’s phrase). City and coat. One big pub with many corridors, explains Richard Burton. The end of the railroad. Come for a day and you won’t leave. A UNESCO City of Literature, and impressive literature, for such a small place: Saunders Lewis, Caradoc Evans, Caryl Lewis, Malcolm Pryce, Carson’s Stripping Penguins Bare, and an illiterate gobshite whose name gives me away who wrote Grits and Stump and Broken Ghost.

And now here is Alex Hubbard; blasted (in a northern Irish slang) from London, naive, ‘loving stories, words and imagining things that are not true’, and clearly fascinated by the city, held and held, like many before and after.

He finds a place, and he is concerned that we do the same – he lovingly wants to share his joy with us, he wants us to feel the joy of discovery, so we find a moral history, a port, a language processing center, a battlefield and, above all, a student town.

We are thrown into a place when it is attacked by a storm: ‘The wind blows against him [,] it pushes him down like something from above’. You can hear crying and water; this is a powerful text. The stars, Yoko’s, the mad and unruly sea. This is the living Aber. You can hear this.

‘Her’ is Josephine, a London student, carrying the baggage of death; his mother’s tragic death will repeat itself and haunt the narrative (as it will haunt the reader): ‘white bone and rotten skin. . . terrible cry’. He makes a life, or at least the first chapter, in Aberystwyth; we see him doing this through his perspective and through the lens of the narrator who is everywhere, who knows, who cares about himself, who often breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the reader.

We bounced between registers and time-frames and were included around a small group of students; their relationships, their conflicts and relationships, the chaos of their lives. There is no purpose, of course, in the sense of a coherent disciplinary structure, but the conversation, the structure, the pace, all are processes, all are holding.

The storm divides the area further – ‘it seems like a town, hills, and then nothing. No one succeeded in walking. . . since the storm came in. The railway tracks are flooded and. . . the buses are all broken.. . . [W]people who try to stray beyond Tan-y-Bwlch find themselves drawn as strangely as if the town were a great black hole at the western end’. Having lived in Aberystwyth for over a quarter of a century, I know this feeling.

The storm disrupts the time continuum and the book takes a magically literal approach to warping and destroying history; Unique characters appear in the town, including a fire-and-brimstone preacher (who gathers a kind of cult around him) and a woman with white teeth to whom he says ‘people often bow down’. A sperm whale is washed ashore, teetering between life and death (tangential declaration: I’ve been working on a novel based on a beached sperm whale for several years. Any parallels between that and the storm will be purely coincidental, to be honest). Everything moves slowly Murakami: ‘history is changing and moving, and it is made of water. It’s talking on the walls… . It is to persuade people that things should not be as they are. . . The town is going crazy’. Owain Glyndwr appears, carrying a machine gun. The WW1 army is evolving, just like the pirates. The elephants in the famous painting eat meat. Glynn’s character is always a horse stuck in a ditch, and, I have to say, to me, it’s all a bit bland.

It’s high-concept, sure, and it’s deeply personal, and if you’re the kind of reader who likes that kind of thing, you’ll pick this book up (and more power to you if you do, I hope you enjoy it), but for me, this kind of hard magic doesn’t work; far from adding to the world and adding to its mystery it instead suggests that those wonders are not enough, and that they are weak, somehow. The old Jewish proverb that says ‘every day we walk blindly among miracles’ breaks down here.

I still enjoyed the visit to the student area; I enjoyed the intrigue and interaction, and I enjoyed the writing – the scene of the ketamine trip is very well done, and Robbie’s character is completely convincing with his teeth-grinding armor, and Josephine was captivating and immersive – but the fourth climax completely threw me off.

More: I felt that the emotional investment I put into the first part of the book was misplaced, even wasted. The world is full of magic, witchcraft and occult attractions (which Hubbard is aware of, here) and this type of myth/fiction seems to be at odds with that, in despair. I don’t see any benefit. It’s easy. But, well, like I say, it’s a personal thing, and if this is Your Thing, then you’ll find most of that stuff here. It will satisfy. I, well, am very happy to be back in Aberystwyth, at about 150 pages.

Storm by Alex Hubbard is published by Seren and is available to buy now.