The Unravelling by Polly Crosby

 

The Unravelling by Polly Crosby.

Published 6th January 2021 by HQ.

From the cover of the book:

When Tartelin Brown accepts a job with the reclusive Marianne Stourbridge, she finds herself on a wild island with a mysterious history.

Tartelin is tasked with hunting butterflies for Marianne’s research. But she quickly uncovers something far more intriguing than the curious creatures that inhabit the landscape.

Because the island and Marianne share a remarkable history, and what happened all those years ago has left its scars, and some terrible secrets.

As Tartelin pieces together Marianne’s connection to the island, she must confront her own reasons for being there. Can the two women finally face up to the painful memories that bind them so tightly to the past?

Atmospheric and deeply emotional, The Unravelling is the captivating novel from the author of The Illustrated Child.

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When Tartelin Brown accepts a job as an assistant to the eccentric and reclusive Marianne Stourbridge on the strange island of Dohhalund off the Suffolk coast, she has no concept of how this will change the direction of her life. Neither the island, nor her new employer, are quite what she expected, and she is unsure if she is up to the task of catching butterflies for the lepidopterist Miss Stourbridge to study - a task she can no longer perform herself now she spends her days confined to a wheelchair in the dusty rooms on the first floor of her crumbling, cliff-top Gothic home, Dogger Bank House.

As Tartelin immerses herself in the mysterious island that is now her home, she comes to realise that this is no ordinary place. There is something strange about Dohhalund, the wildlife that inhabits its landscape, and the enigmatic study that Marianne Stourbridge is undertaking. This is a place with many secrets, closely tied to the history of Marianne and her family - a history that Marianne is reluctant to share.

For Tartelin to get to the truth about Dohhalund, she must help Marianne to come to terms with her past... but first, she must look deep within herself and confront the grief that lies within her own heart...

"The sea is made up of unspeakable sadness..."

Crosby has an uncanny ability to merge reality and the other-worldly, immersing you in a story-scape that blends the lines between magical realism and the harsh truths of the human experience - almost lulling you into a false sense of security before you realise exactly what she is trying to tell you though her lyrical prose. 

This time around rather than exploring the apparently idyllic, fairy-tale world of a princess in a castle as in The Illustrated Child, she delves into the mythical realms of the deep to achieve her end - blurring the lines between the substantial and insubstantial in a whole new way. For it is to the eerie island of Dohhalund, off the Suffolk coast, that we must travel in The Unravelling. This is a place that sits uneasily between the land and the sea, not quite part of one or the other, but incorporating essential elements of both, and this makes it the perfect setting for a haunting tale, rich in underlying maritime folklore - here there be monsters, but it will take some time to discover who, or what, they are... or if they are really monsters at all.

Told in what is essentially two-and-a-half timelines, Crosby gradually unfolds the present and the past of Dohhalund through Marianne's painful family history in 1928; 2018 when Tartelin arrives on the island to work with her; and the pivotal events of 1955 that marked the fate of Marianne and this mysterious place. These timelines weave together beautifully, taking you on a emotional journey that incorporates so many themes around the power of nature; the beauty and cruelty of the natural and man-made worlds; and how tragedy can precipitate change through transformation... oh, and secrets... many secrets...

As Tartelin comes to understand what Marianne is searching for, the relationship blossoms between them beautifully, and they both find a way to deal with the legacy of their secret sorrows and move forward - Tartelin becoming able to open up her heart to love, and Marianne becoming able to forgive.

You will have to discover those secrets for yourself, and I promise that you really, really want to... but I can tell you that this is ultimately a tale about survival, and I love how Crosby works this theme through the story - whether that be in terms of the human and non-human characters, or Dohhalund itself. There is so much to delve into here in terms of fascinating social history around the fishing, pearl harvesting and silk industries of the early twentieth century; of complex family dynamics and the way they cut to the bone of heart-rending human frailty; of how the folly of man leads to tragedy; and of evolution through metamorphosis on a number of levels, which makes this story uniquely compelling - not to mention the way Crosby weaves in the whisper of folklore connected to the sea in the most captivating way imaginable throughout. You feel the insistent pull of the sea in so many facets of this story, which I adored, and the way she uses the motifs of butterflies, birds and spiders to enhance the tale is delicious.

This is a novel that gives you an emotional pummelling, as I knew it would at the hands of Crosby, but it also asks some intriguing questions that prickle the intellectual senses in a very thought provoking way, leaving you with a lot to think about in the way she examines evolution and the significance of mutation. Intriguing indeed.

This is a truly beautiful book that will fill you up and make you ponder. This time Crosby broke me into little pieces, but also remade me in the process, which seems very fitting for a book about transformation, and I loved each and every second I spent on the mysterious isle of Dohhalund. I can already tell that this will be one of my books of 2022.

The Unravelling is available to buy no in hardback, ebook and audio formats now.

Thank you to HQ for sending me a Netgalley copy of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Polly Crosby grew up on the Suffolk coast, and now lives with her husband and son in the heart of Norfolk.

Her debut novel, The Illustrated Child (The Book of Hidden Wonders in the US and Australia) is out now. Polly’s second novel, The Unravelling will be published in January ‘22.

In 2018, Polly won Curtis Brown Creative’s Yesterday Scholarship, which enabled her to finish her novel. Later the same year, The Illustrated Child was awarded runner-up in the Bridport Prize’s Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a First Novel. Polly received the Annabel Abbs Creative Writing Scholarship at the University of East Anglia, and is currently working on her third novel.