Reviews: Slip of a Fish (1)

In this original novel Arnold skilfully renders a woman’s interior landscape and explores the possibilities and limitations of language. Set over the course of a hot summer in the North of England, ‘Slip of a Fish’ expresses Ash’s vivid, fragile interior world as her ‘fertile imagination’ runs increasingly rampant. The novel’s form and imagery are seeped in water; Ash goes wild swimming with her daughter Charlie, ‘she’s a bit of a fish, a slip of a fish’, and the digressive narrative is similarly slippery. The prose skitters and skates as Ash’s thoughts unspool, mixing memories with present observations, and immersing the reader in her mental fabric. Ash loves word play and puns, but her relationship with language often turns oppressive: ‘I didn’t like the way the words breathed, the way they pulsed. What I mean is I wanted full stops. I wanted something to put a stop to it.’ Language proves to be insufficient as a mode of communication – although obsessed with linguistic precision and stylistics, Ash struggles to invest her own speech with meaning: ‘I didn’t want to think any more about words and the way they flip and turn and trick, so I said something. I had nothing to say but I said something anyway.’ Absorbing and unsettling, ‘Slip of a Fish’ is an inventive exploration of interior life.