It’s always interesting when a novel is set somewhere you know particularly well, which is why I was intrigued by Sri Lankan author Roma Tearne’s fourth book The Swimmer. Apart from calling Ipswich a city – a heinous crime as any Norwich fan will tell you – her images of the Suffolk coast are hauntingly beautiful and impressively accurate.
At the Manchester Literature event I was covering, I actually asked her what research she’d undertaken (Tearne lives in Oxford) – and she explained she’d decamped to Aldeburgh for a while. But it wouldn’t have mattered if her knowledge was limited to a weekend break – sometimes the best writers of East Anglian landscapes weren’t actually raised in the area. I’m thinking particularly of the peerless German writer WG Sebald, whose Rings Of Saturn is frankly the most beautifully mediative book on Norfolk and Suffolk’s evocative vistas. He had lived in Norfolk since the 1970s, but still. As Tearne noted (and she loves Sebald too), perhaps the outsider’s eye is more important than the local’s.
