I don't know whether it's memories of idyllic childhood holidays or the hypnotic and untameable power of the sea, but Cornwall has always had a magical hold over me; a hold which Helen Dunmore captures so brilliantly in her latest children's book, Ingo.
Here, Dunmore returns to Zennor, the setting of her adult novel Darkness in Zennor. This time, the story opens in the church, and with its famous wooden carving of a mermaid. Legend has it that she fell in love with a local villager, Mathew Trewhella, having heard him singing in the choir. Centuries later, the father of Ingo's narrator Sapphy, and her brother Conor, has the same name. "Quite by chance," he claims.
The modern-day Trewhella family live by the sea, both in the sense of proximity and by virtue of the fact that Mathew is a primarily a fisherman, tending lobsterpots and taking photographs to sell to tourists. Sapphy and Conor have "their own" cove, reached via an overgrown path, a cliff and a perilous jumble of huge black rocks. They visit it most summer days, swimming, diving, exploring, picnicking. With spare prose, Dunmore evokes everything wonderful about Cornish seaside holidays. And these two actually live there, lucky devils!
But the luck runs out. Their father disappears, believed lost at sea. The children don't believe it. They are convinced that, as long as they go on thinking he's alive, there's hope. To accept that a man who knew "every wrinkle of the coast" has been taken by the sea is impossible. But, in order to survive, their mother decides - or, more accurately, circumstances dictate - that life must go on.
One day Sapphy sees her brother at the cove in conversation with someone half in and half out of the water: Elvira. Later, she meets Elvira's brother, and the adventure takes on a whole new dimension. This early revelation is no real revelation because Dunmore has steered us towards it from the outset. The pleasure is in how she leads us to it and, of course, where she then takes us.
To be familiar with characters of folklore and to find them to be flesh and blood (and inextricably linked with one's own life) are, of course, two quite different matters. Like the sea itself, these beings can sometimes be calm and beautiful, sometimes angry and awesome. Slowly but surely, events take a sinister turn, where doing the right thing is a matter of perspective, and Sapphy and Conor must decide just whose side they're on. Lives depend on it.
As ever, Dunmore's characters are beautifully drawn, from the mysterious Granny Carne (of indeterminate age and infinite wisdom) to Sapphy and Conor's poor mother who, through a child's eyes, is seen as the villain of the piece for being guilty of trying to build a life now that her husband has gone.
Though the first in a series, this book works perfectly as a standalone title, with a satisfying resolution but enough left hanging in the air to make the characters and situations live on in the reader's mind. Ingo has a haunting, dangerous beauty all of its own.
