Blog tour: High Tide by Livia Franchini
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘Summer, 1992. Peter, a promising young artist, vanishes off the coast of Tuscany. Ten days later, his body washes ashore, bloated and unrecognisable. For one sweltering summer, his death grips the public imagination, before fading into the haze of nineties lore.
‘Thirty years on, Peter’s widow, Marie, has become infamous in her own right. A cult but reclusive horror writer, her novels are celebrated for their dark brilliance – but no one knows the woman behind the pen name, or the memories she’s spent a lifetime suppressing.
‘When a retrospective of Peter’s work is announced at a prestigious London gallery, an old friend resurfaces who seems determined to drag Marie from the shadows and unmask her. Drawn back to Italy, she feels the past begin to stir: the heat, the secrets, the girl she once was. What does she owe the dead – and how far will she go to protect the living?’
In High Tide, by Livia Franchini, we follow two timelines. In 1991, young university drop-out Mary Godwin is drawn into an intense relationship with 29-year-old emerging artist Peter Shelley.
When Peter gets into trouble with the law – and his father, a wealthy MP – for holding an exhibition in an unoccupied shop, the pair flee to Italy where, for a few weeks in the spring of 1992, they live off the generosity of Peter’s super-rich friend Noel Byrne. Their adventure ends in tragedy, though, when Peter drowns off the coast of Viareggio.
In 2021, Mary – now earning a living as reclusive horror author Marie Baillie – is pulled back towards the past when a retrospective show of Peter’s work is announced. At the same time, Ed (Tre) Trelawny, a friend/lackey of Noel’s she briefly shared a flat with in Italy and hasn’t seen in 30 years, is trying to get back in contact with her and reveal her true identity to the world, but is she ready to confront and re-evaluate the events surrounding Peter’s death?
I found a lot to like in High Tide! I was immediately drawn in to Mary’s life in what I think of as the “long 80s”: she lives cheaply in a shoddily-converted school in yet-to-be-gentrified south London, and post-punk and new wave are yet to fully give way to Britpop and Eurodance (I was ridiculously pleased to see Modern English referenced, as well as New Order). Most of her story is set in Italy, though, and the cities and towns she stays in are described in lush, vivid detail.
With beautiful scenery and few obligations, Mary’s tenure in Italy has the potential to grant her the headspace to finally write the novel that’s trapped inside her. However, she doesn’t reckon with Peter’s strange and worrying behaviour (they’ve only been together a few months, and her youth and the intensity of their fresh romance renders her infinitely forgiving), or the disruption wrought by the arrival of careless, fun-loving Noel Byrne, which includes the introduction of Tre as an unwanted flatmate.
What’s more, we’re aware from the start that this story does not end well, so on top of all the interpersonal tension, I was constantly on edge waiting to find out exactly how the other shoe was going to drop. While the eventual reveal turns out to be more of a whimper than a bang, I could understand why Mary felt the need to bury the memory and avoid examining it too closely for so long.
As you might have gathered from the names and events, High Tide is inspired by the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (as she was then) and Percy Bysshe Shelley, melding together the events of the 19th-century couple’s fateful stay with Lord Byron and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont in Geneva (Noel Byrne stands in for Byron, and 20th-century Mary’s stepsister Clare also has a part), and Percy’s death by drowning off the coast of Italy in 1822. I found it really interesting and engaging to see how this story married up with, and diverged from these historical events.
Given this source material, most of the principal characters in High Tide are upper/upper-middle class. In some ways, I found it challenging to feel sympathy for them because, for all they rhapsodise about being in trouble or “cut off”, there’s a high probability things would have eventually blown over and they would have ultimately been okay if they’d just gone home to face the music. Tre is the exception – he doesn’t come from money, and is essentially employed by Ed Byrne as an assistant – and this makes him a refreshing and curious “chancer” character without such a safety net, even if he’s not always likeable or honourable.
Something else I liked about this novel, in the 2021 storyline, was its meta-ness. As an author, Marie is an observant, highly self-aware narrator who, for example, notifies us when she’s imagined scenes and characters to fill in parts of the earlier story she didn’t personally witness, and is rather bemused by how ardent some of her fans are. Aside from the whole “secret identity” thing, she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and is often humorous, which I really appreciated.
High Tide is a vivid and tense novel that takes inspiration from Mary and Percy Shelley’s story.
