I was thirteen and wanted to work. Someone told me that you could get paid to referee basketball games and where to go to find out about such weekend employment. I needed income to bolster my collections of stamps and Sherlock Holmes novels. I vaguely remember going to an office full of adolescents queueing in front of a young man who looked every inch an administrator. When my turn came, he asked me if I had any experience and I lied. I left that place with details of a game that would be played two days later, and the promise of 700 pesetas in cash. Nowadays, if a thirteen-year-old wants to research something he’s ignorant about, he’ll go to YouTube. That same afternoon I bought a whistle in a sports shop and went to the library.
More than a few deaths occur in Karen Powell’s debut novel, but despite its wild-and-windy-moors Yorkshire setting, “The River Within” is no stock northern English murder mystery. In well under 300 fast-turning pages, Powell manages something much larger and more complex: an autopsy of the entire caste system of post-World War II Britain.
He’s a poet who mesmerizes not by stillness but by zigs and zags, and he very much wants to take the reader with him as he island hops from idea to idea.
Give in to its choral quality for stretches of time, and it’s easy to feel not just the sweep of our centuries but the dialogical nature of our grandest ideas and most persistent struggles — a notion reflected in an essay by Katharine Fullerton Gerould, another writer to whom I was introduced by this book. In 1935, in “An Essay on Essays,” she wrote in favor of nonpolemical work. A good essay, she said, “inevitably sets the reader to thinking,” and “meditation is highly contagious.”
Each half folds back into the past, uneasy and mourning; time stretches and flattens, yearning for a place that for one reason or another doesn't exist any more.