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2000s: Marvellous Ways is a little old lady who lives alone in a Cornish Creek waiting….until one day she gets an unexpected visitor.
A Year of Marvellous Ways
What you need to know before your trail
Marvellous Ways is eighty-nine years old and the Creek she calls home is almost all she’s ever known. She spends her days sitting by the river, telescope in hand, waiting for something – she’s not sure what but she’ll know when she sees it.
One day she comes along an injured soldier, also with an unusual name – Francis Drake – and like Marvellous he is used to people commenting on his name. He’s there to fulfill the wish of dying man. Marvellous offers to help him.
But who is really helping whom?
Travel Guide
Marvellous lives in the middle of a remote and Cornish Creek (Roseland peninsula perhaps?) but to her this is more than a creek, this is a world and unique landscape she paints as her own. The imagery reads like a painting –
“I awoke dazed, looking up through a portal to a star-drenched sky. And beyond the stars bands of milky light stretched out to the hush of infinity.”
Her life is revealed by a series of fantastical and poignant stories she tells to the solider and often to herself in little snippets which read like dreams. She lives in a fictional place where the sign says St Ophere and the origins of that place name are a delight to discover! With a church at its centre. Her Cornwall is embedded in her soul, her mind and her very being. This is the place for thought and reflection –
“For as long as she could remember the tide had carved around the church but the church had broken away from the people or maybe the people had broken away from the church?”
The stories of Marvelous – how she came to be in that creek, and how Drake came to join her there are revealed by gentle ebbs and flows of the tide.
In the ‘undulating nocturnal silence’ Marvellous smiles as she keeps company with the moon, sitting on the ‘dirt grass moor and sand, a whole history of the Peninsula laid down one on top of the other, like fossils, like prayers’ . She tells stories…oh how she tells stories of wonderment.
With characters named Marvellous Ways; Francis Drake; Paper Jack; Peace, amongst others, the scene is set for some magical realism with stars and glow bugs lighting the stage.
Drake’s story is also told as a journey to Cornwall, his experiences in war and how he spends time in London adapting to civvie life before he sets off and ends up in the creek. Wartime London is evoked poignantly too but it’s when the journey starts to that creek when Drake is about to discover a world of stories, hope and salvation.
Booktrailer Review
Clare:
Lyrical, quirky and magical in equal measure. Oh I so wanted to meet Marvelous when reading this. Her world was one of magical realism and it was a joy to linger with her beside the creek and experience the sounds and smells all around. Listen to her telling stories and seeing her relationship with Drake develop as it does was an unusual yet uplifting journey.
She is a very memorable character and you leave it feeling as if you’ve learned something valuable from Marvellous about how it is to think about life, have hope, dream big and live a simple, pleasurable life in a little part of Cornish paradise.
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