Review: To Heaven by Water

It happens to us all ... sometimes when we are still too young to grasp its full significance, sometimes much later. The realities of a death in one’s immediate family and the relational shifts it can cause are an event that touches everyone.

In Justin Cartwright’s latest novel, To Heaven by Water, the Cross family are coming to terms with the death of their matriarch, Nancy. David Cross, a retired television newsreader, deals with the death of his wife and his recent retirement by working out — almost obsessively — at the local gym.

“David rows away. It’s far from certain where he is heading … He rows on for half an hour until he has floated free of the gym and on to a sea of tranquility. He whispers to himself, ‘To heaven by water’.”

What he is reluctant to tell his children is that in some ways he feels happier since Nancy’s death than he has felt in a long time. His story takes the reader from the present day to a time which has become halcyon in his memory — a summer in Rome when he worked on a film with Richard Burton.

His son Ed, an up-and-coming lawyer, is dealing with a crisis of career and fidelity. While his wife Rosalie is desperate to become pregnant, Ed begins an affair with a colleague. An opportunity to move away from London provides an escape from the complications of his current employment, as well his discomfort with the new family dynamic minus his mother’s steadying influence.

“He will also escape from his old dad, whose large presence, scented with decay, still breathes on him.” Ironically, Ed believes his father sees redemption as “the search for something beyond this world, as if life is other than the one we lead” — just as Ed seeks to redeem himself in a new country.

Lucy, Ed’s sister, struggles most with the loss of her mother. A bright and beautiful woman, the gap left by Nancy, along with a disastrous love affair, leave Lucy shaken in her certainty of the world.

“And now Lucy thinks that she has always treated herself as a special case, someone deserving of some unique consideration …Now she knows that none of us is exempt.”

The prologue sees David visiting his older brother Guy, who for most of his adult life has searched for meaning among the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Now nearing death, Guy and David reunite to come to some understanding of one another. This theme is revisited later in the novel, and provides the structure for one of the prevailing themes — the hope for transcendence.

“Doomed to disappointment these hopes may be, but this longing is in the fibres of human existence.”

The moral fibre of the characters is not always admirable; their rationales and motives not always noble or unselfish. Professed values are not always acted upon or upheld. As such they are human, fallible, and believable.

The novel proper begins and ends with the semi-regular gathering of some of David’s old and dear friends. As with family, the bothersome minutae of everyday living often take precedence over the love and comfort of others. But it is here that the greatest hope for happiness, peace — and trancendence — exist.

To Heaven by Water — a quote from Ulysses, by the way — is a novel with a cumulative effect. As each character is explored, a bigger picture — with some surprising twists — emerges.

Despite a cover design that does the book no favours in terms of helping it stand out, it is worth searching for.

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