‘A tangible book as alive as the weather’: Jenny Landreth for Caught by the River

Jenny Landreth – winner of the Sunday Times Sports Book of the Year 2017 for Swell: A Waterbiography – gives a wonderful, long review of Wild Woman Swimming for Caught by the River. Extract below.

‘This is a tangible book. It’s as alive as weather. Everything thrusts outward from Lynne, there’s a physicality to it. It follows the years in great big footsteps and there’s a sense of everything expanding out as the weather warms and then contracting back in again as ice returns.  Or it’s like the tide. Sometimes the joy is palpable, but then, so is the fear. Sometimes that fear belongs to me, the reader. When she writes ‘we find another deep cave … we’re pulled in and shooshed back; it’s like being caught in the windpipe of a living creature’ I have to put the book down, take a minute. She’s casually, devastatingly, laid out my own nightmare, and I can feel it, safely here on dry land. She is not immune to fear herself, and knows how to tell it – there are stories in here that have the pacing of a good thriller. Times where it feels really wild, where Lynne dances on ‘the edge of control’, where the water makes her afraid and unsure. Of course you know she survives this one but the adrenaline! Hers, mine! It all adds to the allure of this extraordinary woman, how she faced things some of us don’t dare think of.

And alongside all of this, there’s love. So much of it, again like waves coming in and going out again. That too you can feel on the page, and it’s never cloying, always rather wonderful, actually. For her tribe and for her surroundings, an enthusiastic passion that really only wanes right at the very end, when her certainty is gone.

I don’t want to ward off hags, witches or wild women. I want the opposite of a hag stone, something that will ward them towards me. And I think this book is that thing. I’m going to carry it in my backpack, it’ll act as a talisperson, a signal. And if people mistake me for a wild woman, though I have a tenth of Lynne’s character and daring, I shall be delighted. Yes! I’ll say, I am a wild woman. What do you make of that?’