Overview

The acclaimed first novel by one of Flamingo’s most gifted young writers, author of ‘The Bronski House’ and ‘The Spirit Wrestlers’. Philip Marsden’s brilliant first novel is set in the 1930s, in the small Cornish fishing village of Polmayne. A newcomer to the village, Jack Sweeney, buys a boat and establishes himself as a fisherman, gradually winning the respect even of the village elders. But times are changing, and a new kind of visitor is beginning to appear in Polmayne. A bohemian colony of artists offends some sensibilities, while a hotel is opened to accommodate the summer tourists, and pleasure steamers mingle with the fishing boats in the harbour. Yet, despite the superficial changes, the old ways and the old hazards of Cornish life endure. Offshore, just below the surface of the waves, lie the Main Cages, a treacherous outcrop of rock where many ships and many lives have been lost. Firmly rooted in a particular place and time, yet recalling in its universality such books as Graham Swift’s ‘Waterland’ and E. Annie Proulx’s ‘The Shipping News’, ‘The Main Cages’ is a gripping story of love and death, and a remarkable fictional debut.

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9780007137596

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Reviews

'The Main Cages' is quite simply a joy to read. It is at once a memorable adventure, a moving love story, and an intriguing portrait of a changing way of life -- and on every level, it succeeds magnificently.' Mail on Sunday 'Marsden brilliantly evokes the everyday life of a Cornish village!a gripping yarn.' Evening Standard 'Philip Marsden's luminous first novel is an elemental tale of man and nature and the profoundly skewed relationship in which they are locked!Underpinning all this is Marsden's lean, exact and beautiful prose. Even the details of the nautical world acquire a poetry. Like a seashell it contains the various music of the sea within it.' TLS 'Like a latter-day Dylan Thomas peeping through the windows in 'Under Milk Wood', Marsden charts the changes and observes the constants of [Polmayne's] communal life.' Sunday Times 'The world of Polmayne is so sharply observed that its [characters] stay etched in the mind like old photographs.' Independent

'Much more than mere beach-reading. MArsden writes with deep feeling for a simpler, more meaningful life - and with a real sense of drama of each and every life.' Evening Standard 'Sails us back to a world somewhere between du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek and Swallows and Amazons.' Observer

When Jack Sweeney first arrives in the Cornish town of Polmayne in the 1930s, he finds a thriving fishing community. He falls in love with the place at first sight and willingly trades his unhappy past for a new future on the sea: one that provides him with a combination of steady work and a sense of peace and tranquility. As he becomes more settled, Jack meets artist Anna Abraham, the young Russian wife of a regular summer visitor to Polmayne, and the trio soon become friends. When Anna and her husband return to London, they continue to correspond via regular letters. But the letters become more intimate and Anna severs all ties to avoid inevitable pain. Meanwhile progress reaches Polmayne and dramatic changes to the town become unavoidable, at the same time as the sea's resources begin to shrink and the fabric that the town rests on starts to fray. Jack's life too takes a dramatic turn before nature finally unleashes her unpredictable force and the sea re-affirms its domination of the town. Widely praised for his travel writing, Marsden is just as remarkable as a novelist, his love of nature apparent throughout this simultaneously gripping and evocative story. The reader cannot fail to be moved by the intensity of Jack's relationship both with the sea and with Anna, and yet we know that in the end only the sea can survive. Beautifully written and deeply absorbing, this novel will leave you immensely satisfied and searching out more books written by this gifted author. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Philip Marsden is the author of A Far Country: Travels in Ethiopia, The Crossing Place: Among the Armenians (which won the Somerset Maugham Award), The Bronski House, The Spirit-Wrestlers: And Other Survivors of the Russian Century‘(winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year Award) and the novel The Main Cages. He is the editor of The Spectator Book of Travel Writing and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His work has been translated into ten languages.

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