Introducing Half a Creature from the Sea, by David Almond

Set in his native Tyneside, David Almond’s collection of stories Half a Creature from the Sea brings together a charming coterie of characters, from children to Great North runners, from poltergeists to butchers. Stephen Regan introduces the special Durham Book Festival edition of the book, which is being distributed free around Durham as part of the Big Read. Pick up your copy and share your thoughts on this mysterious and moving work.

As a child, the poet William Blake had visions of God and the angels. At the age of four, he saw God putting his head to the window, and at nine he saw a tree filled with angels. This intense mystical vision shaped and sustained his work as an artist, enabling him “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower.” It comes as no surprise to find that Blake is a powerful presence in David Almond’s captivating collection of stories, Half a Creature from the Sea. These are stories that trace the difficult and often painful transition from innocence to experience, seeking in the process to recover the wonder and mystery of childhood. In all of these stories, there are visions and intuitions of the supernatural, and a strange and beguiling blend of the mundane and the magical.

What gives these stories an immense appeal and distinction is their rootedness in the culture and geography of North East England. They take their inspiration from childhood memories of working life in the small town of Felling-on-Tyne, with its mining and shipbuilding occupations, its Irish Catholic traditions, and its colourful local characters. The book evokes this Tyneside setting through a richly detailed description of dark terraced streets, deserted railway lines, and looming shipyard cranes. Felling looks out over the bridges and steeples of Newcastle and towards the vast expanse of the North Sea. It has its pastoral reaches in the nearby fields and hills, and in the coastal stretches of seaside towns like South Shields. A vivid and realistic sense of place, combined with a fluent depiction of local speech, makes the visitation of spirits and the occurrence of the magical in these stories all the more striking.

Aerial view of the Quayside, Newcastle upon Tyne, March 1950 (TWAM ref. DT.TUR/2/4402). Reproduced courtesy of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.

In the opening story, “Slog’s Dad”, the local butcher’s shop with its black pudding and its bucket of bones for dogs provides the setting for a boy’s reunion with his dead father. Throughout these stories, there is a longing for the living and the dead to be “together again one day in Heaven”, coupled with a sorrowful erosion of faith. “Harry Miller’s Run”, a masterpiece of the short story form, invests its faith in continuity and togetherness. It closes with a celebration of the Great North Run that eases the story’s loss and lifts us into the realm of the visionary, with “a crowd that seemed like the whole of Tyneside, the whole of the “world, all running through the blazing sunlight to the sea”. The title of the story “When God Came to Cathleen’s Garden” invites both wonder and incredulity, and it leaves us pondering the paranormal, that which is beyond the normal and beyond our usual rational explanations of the world. Without imposing too much philosophical weight on these deftly crafted stories, we might say that they work in dialectical ways, with the continual interplay of opposites lifting us to a new level of understanding. Like Norman in “May Malone”, we begin to open our eyes and learn to see that “the world is a strange and gorgeous and astonishing place”.

Each story in the collection is accompanied by a brief authorial essay that simultaneously announces its biographical reality and declares its patent fictionality. These appealing prefaces have a metafictive role in revealing to us the process of composition. They tell us that stories are not separate from life but always actively engaged with it. Real worlds and dream worlds collide and collude continuously. So, too, the enchanting illustrations by Eleanor Taylor blend actuality and fantasy. The beautiful dark birds flown in from the sea inhabit and haunt that double realm. The title story, about “a daughter who might be half a creature from the sea”, is one of the strangest in the collection, subtly interweaving memories of the glorious Northumberland coast with myths of mermaids and sea gods. Like all the other stories, though, it charts that troubling but inevitable rite of passage from innocence to experience. It tells us that “Sometimes … the best way to understand how to be human is to understand our strangeness”.

Grab your copy of Half a Creature from the Sea from libraries and various other locations around County Durham. The Big Read is part of the Durham Book Festival, which is a Durham County Council festival produced by New Writing North with support from Durham University and Arts Council England. David Almond will be talking about The Books that Made Me at Durham Book Festival on 14th October.