BOOK REVIEW
Mired in the Mizzle of Time
Kent Barker reviews Winchelsea, the new novel by Alex Preston
It may be perverse to feel proprietorial about someone who has been dead for nearly 300 years, but I have a peculiar association with the smuggler Gabriel Tomkins. Ten years back I wrote a sort of biography of him and then a group of us toured venues in Kent and Sussex performing a ‘café-theatre’ play based on his life and his association with the Hawkhurst gang.
So I was both flattered and trepidatious to find that ‘my’ Gabriel features prominently in the new novel by writer Alex Preston. Winchelsea is a rollicking, swashbuckling adventure set in the 1740s – as the author himself says, a kind of Moonfleet for adults. And it does have decidedly adult themes, including gender dysphoria and incest.
But for me a central question was how acceptable is it to bend history in order to create a good tale? As well as being an extremely accomplished author, Preston is a journalist so perhaps he’s adopted the old Fleet Street adage: don’t let the facts stand in the way of the story. In a way I don’t mind so much that he’s completely ignored Tomkins’ involvement with the Hawkhurst gang – or that he has him horribly mutilated and left for dead half a decade before he actually met his end on the gallows of Bedford gaol.
No, for me the greater sin is his treatment of the 1746 ‘battle’ of Goudhurst and its aftermath and having two leaders of the Hawkhurst gang – Arthur Grey and his successor Thomas Kingsmill – present and captured. Historic evidence puts Grey in prison awaiting execution at the time, and neither he nor Kingsmill were apprehended that day. The numbers involved and killed are also generally thought to be far lower than in this account.
Having said that, Preston’s imaginary background to the mysterious ‘General’ Sturt who led the vanquishing of the Hawkhurst Gang at the battle is a masterful conceit – as was putting him close to the Battle of Culloden alongside Bonnie Prince Charlie the previous year.
But the real triumph of this book is to be found not in the scenes in Kent or Scotland, but in the eponymous Sussex town of Winchelsea. The marsh mists, the ferry over the Brede, the network of tunnels beneath homes of the townsfolk, all are extraordinarily evocative. Take just this passage: “The roads were miry in the mizzle; pigs rootled in amongst the tufts of grass and florets of dandelion that grew along the middle of the road. Winchelsea had about it a bleak, ill-used air that day, with dark clouds overhead and the threat of more rain.”
As with ‘mizzle’ Preston unleashes a formidable descriptive vocabulary – words one initially assumes are invented until closely checked: originary, gewgaw, mayhap, gravidity, miasmatic, kopstoot, muggets and numbles all exist – though I’m not so sure about fligged and incomplex. His skill, though, is to let the words add to the atmosphere but not impede the flow. Since I was a child – probably reading Moonfleet –
I can’t remember a book that so sweeps you along on its rapid current and finally washes you up on a shore of complete satisfaction. Just don’t pay too much attention to the history!
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