Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick

1980s England, a warm spring night. While teenagers party out on the street, a teacher wades into a river and takes his life. This is how Alice Chadwick sets up her debut novel, Dark Like Under, a lavish and penetrating exploration of grief, and how injustice, cruelty, and the weakness of adults weigh on the lives of children.  

From the start, Chadwick pulls the reader in with scenes that evoke a time and place as unmistakable as it is alluring. We wander across the unnamed town, ancient and rural, encircled by a stone wall, stretching to the far, green edges where the last family farms still operate. Davy, who doesn’t want to be a farmer, goes down late for breakfast. “‘Ah, the vision of youth,’ his dad says, as he walks into the kitchen. ‘Eventually he rises.’ A table of heads look up, nod, and look back down. They smell of outside, and animal feed. A kiss to the side of his head – his mum in his dad’s jacket with a bucket for the chickens.” We hear The Cure and The Stranglers on the radio and, off-handedly at various points, references to the miners, the Falkland Islands, and Mrs. Thatcher. It’s a time before phones demand constant attention and when poetry is still a subject taught at school. The nostalgia we feel could be regret for progress, or a testament to Chadwick’s clear-sighted observations. 

The story unfolds over the course of a day, after the body has been retrieved. Hour by hour, we shift through the views of students and teachers, Kelly, Miriam, Robin, Tin (Thomasin), James, Miss Sharpe, Mr. Dalton, Dr. Cole. Every character is so richly depicted, so expertly drawn with emotional depth and intelligence that we understand not only the individual, but the way each person influences the others and how the town – and the country – has evolved. By the time the students arrive at school, they are still unaware of the tragedy. They gather in the canteen, “assemble in rows, a neat division down the centre like an aisle in a church, a line mown through long grass” until Gomme, the headmaster, makes a brief announcement, ineloquent and void of details, informing them that Mr. Ardennes has passed. “Pronounced dead last night. Cold. That is, very early in the morning.” Unlike Gomme, Mr. Ardennes was well-liked and the students struggle to process this news. “A soft hissing begins. Who can say where exactly it starts? It rises from them as a body, single and continuous.” Before too much fuss can be made, they are dismissed by Miss Harper and instructed to proceed to their first lesson. Gomme, in his preposterous rabbit-fur hood, will succumb to madness by mid-afternoon but the rest of them will carry on. 

Chadwick is brilliant with metaphors and exacting with similes. When Dr. Cole, in English class, leans over to explain why words matter, “His face, like a steak, hangs raw and heavy.” Tin, when inconsolable, is “concrete-faced” and Davy has a “voice like milk, hands like great gloves.” We gain layers of meaning through the assessment of a charcoal sketch done by Kelly in art class: “A single shaky pebble, an outpouring of shadow. Another triumph of inaccuracy, Miss Sharpe sees. What is weighty and indisputable rendered evasive; what is fine and insubstantial laid down heavy like a brick.” There are echoes of Claire Louise Bennett in the prose, though less opaque and more accessible. While the subplots involve the usual high school dramas, petty jealousies and strained friendships, they ring true and are believable. Chadwick’s depiction of teenagers is generous, never condescending or trite.

Near the end, we enter Mr. Ardennes’s head on the last night of his life. “So it came, he found, in traitorous middle age, for your working body, your legs and arms and effort, for your waking hours and then your sleeping ones, and it came for your throat. Progress. Competition. Individual goals. He could not swallow these words and he would not voice them. To kids who knew, deep down, that they knew better.” Dark Like Under is a quintessentially English novel, subtle in tone and impeccably written. I did not want this book to end but when it did, that was alright too. Everything that needed saying had been said. There it is, life and death. In England and elsewhere.

Pamela Hensley

Pamela Hensley is the managing editor of yolk literary journal. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, and the Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. She is the creator and host of the podcast How I Wrote This and a member of the board of the Quebec Writers' Federation.