One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide – a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – all facing their own personal disasters.

Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

Dear Diary constitutes a memoir not a letter), reassuring herself that she is something other than being a now-superfluous parent, and for whom Salisbury inspires hope. A somewhat confused young man who, although born in the city, takes the icon quite literally as a sign that he should move on to greater things, or at least to other people.  Each voice is alternately experiential and reflective, in the first and third person. The voices only exist when they are narrating, so suggesting that it is necessary to live one’s life as a narrative, to  “try to tell it like a story, make a shape of experience [one] can control, find a way to understand it, make a moral out of random experience and live by that.”  This, lest we become nothing more than  “fucking suitcases buffeting our way through lost luggage.”   Of course the narratives intersect and flow into one another, as they must do in life as well as literature. They modify each other as they all get told. The effect of Norris’s prose on me is eerie. It’s as if the stories create a new voice as they touch one another. This is a voice neither in first or third, but in the second person. ‘You’, the reader are not just being addressed implicitly but explicitly brought into the whole through personal history, emotion, and a bit of sentimental nostalgia. I find it intriguing as a technique and satisfying as a literary experience even if it is largely dominated by sex, booze, drugs and death. There’s clearly a lot going on in Wiltshire.

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Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

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