NIGHT COMES DOWN

The carving out of a railway branch line brings dramatic shifts to a rural English valley.

Set in the mid-19th century, Aronowitz’s novel vividly evokes the impact of the industrial revolution on a traditional community, as the new rail track is dug and blasted across the Herefordshire countryside. For 17-year-old Grace Matthews, a member of the Anti-Railway League and self-styled “guardian of the woods and fields who had to defend nature from attack,” this development, like “the factories, the coal-black smokestacks, the stagnating canals,” is ruining the natural world. It’s also adding to the fury she already feels towards her father, a doctor (and rail supporter) whom she blames for the death of her mother from breast cancer, and who now treats his daughter as an unpaid cook and maid. For Sean McClennan, one of the Irish navvies—laborers—doing the backbreaking physical work for the rail company, the job generates money to send back to Ireland, to help the faltering family farm. Inevitably, these two figures will experience mutual attraction and meet. Meanwhile, Grace has begun to punish her father, using her knowledge of herbalism to infect his snuff with hallucinogenic dried mushrooms, leading to manic episodes, and eventually to the novel’s second time stream, set some seven years later, which finds Grace incarcerated in Hereford’s Insane Asylum for her crimes against her parent. Although absorbingly detailed, the book’s narrative terrain is a tight and relatively static one which Aronowitz circles repeatedly—the timeless beauty of the natural world, the violent damage to the landscape, Sean’s homesickness and financial need, Grace’s anger. Moreover, Grace is a cool, rebarbative, and somewhat anachronistic figure. She spies on Sean at the navvies’ camp, boldly walks into his digs uninvited one day, and elsewhere calls an innkeeper a “stupid bigot.” The mismatched romance similarly lacks conviction, as does the tale’s abrupt, open-ended cessation.

A sincere environmental message is underserved by flawed storytelling.