Haweswater by Sarah Hall

Haweswater Reviews

• 
  Will Byrnes

  Ok, I selected this from our stacks because it was of reasonable length, and I figured that if it was good, I could blast through two others of hers that we have on hand. BUT, I wondered what the hell I was reading in short order. There is payload about the small, isolated, Lake District community, Mardale, in which the action is set. The story has to do with the Manchester Waterworks coming to town and telling folks sorry, but we will be filling up your lovely valley and village. A dam is planned. The messenger is the suave, somewhat mysterious Jack Liggett, who has a knack, and seems determined to get the town to agree with the rationale for the project. He seems to want to be liked. Then there is Janet Lightburn, the strong, intelligent and feisty daughter of Sam and Ella. Is this a serious novel or a silly romance? 200 pages in, I felt no real desire to read anything more by this author. By the end of the book, I was a little more open to the possibility.
  
  There is some very nice writing in here, to be sure, and we do learn something about the area and the times (depression). She does a lot with water, the image of which pervades the book in various forms. And her nature writing is quite lovely. I was troubled by the jarring shift in character applied to Janet, the very strong leading lady, who, after a very dire event, completely loses it. Her final swipe at the project seemed rather pathetic. And I wanted for much more to be done with her brother, Isaac. He was intriguing while on stage, but was never explained or given much depth. What happens with him also seemed inexplicable. I suppose one can forgive such in a first novel. Does Hall improve enough with subsequent works to be granted a second chance? That feeling of bodice-ripping lingers.
  
  Why was it that the lovemaking between Jack and Janet was always violent, leaving one or both bruised or bleeding every time?
  
  The eagle Jack has killed was intended to be an affront to the uppers among whom he swims, but when it is brought to him, he feels shame for what he has done. This echoes his mixed feelings at killing Marden. He dies trying to make some amends for this sin.
  
  Why must the strong, strong, strong Janet fall to pieces at the end?
  
  
• 
  ☕Laura

  This is the third book I have read by Sarah Hall, and I have to say she is an amazingly gifted writer. I loved
  The Electric Michelangelo and approached Haweswater with eager anticipation. It did not disappoint.
  
  Haweswater tells the story of the quaint English farming village of Marsdale which in 1936 is due to be flooded through the creation of the Haweswater dam and reservoir, to be sacrificed for the greater good. Jack Ligget is a Waterworks representative who arrives to apprise the village residents of the plan, an objective outsider who finds the village and its people having an unexpected and transformative effect on him.
  
  This is also the story of the Lightburn family; father Samuel, mother Ella, young son Isaac, forever drawn to the water, and daughter Janet, a passionate and strong-willed young woman who faces Jack Ligget head-on.
  
  This book is ultimately about transformation in its various forms and lays bare the human experience without reservation. Love and hatred, lust and anger, grief and redemption are offered up for the reader to take into themselves, to feel and absorb. Through vivid and beautiful language this author creates settings and characters which draw the reader in as one of them. This is a book that will stay with me for a long time.
• 
  Karen

  I recently read, and was somewhat blown away by, Sarah Hall's most recent novel "Burntcoat". Having not read this author before I decided to explore her back catalogue and requested "Haweswater" from the library.
  
  This novel follows the demise of the small, religious and largely unchanged village of Marsdale in England's Lake District. In the 1930s the village and its's surroundings are submerged for a new reservoir to feed the growing Manchester. This event brings together Jack Ligget, the Waterworks representative and Janet Lightburn, a local woman. The characters and events within the novel are fiction woven around fact as Haweswater is a real reservoir in the valley of Mardale, in the Lake District. The natural lake was controversially dammed by the Manchester Corporation having gained permission via a Private Act of Parliament.
  
  In the following pages so many themes are explored around this relationship, the Lakes, the village way of life and its inhabitants. This is a beautifully written novel that captures the times and the landscape superbly.
  
  "It began to rain, a fat slapping rain that ringed in the water and leapt up out of it. The air became blue with its speed. Rain hissed like soft glass coming from the sky. A cough of distant thunder in the throat of the hills to the north-east. The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a flat cloth cap ..."
• 
  Magdalith

  Wow. W jakiś sposób duch Wichrowych Wzgórz unosi się nad tą powieścią.
  Ciemna, namiętna, przesiąknięta smutkiem jak wszechobecną w tej historii wodą, symboliczna opowieść, z niesamowitym klimatem stworzonym przez obłędne opisy przyrody. Z postaciami, których portretów nie da się zapomnieć. Właściwie nie zaskakująca żadnym z tragicznych wydarzeń, bo od pierwszych zdań wiemy, ku czemu to wszystko zmierza. Ale fabuła (jak i jej alegoryczne przesłanie) zrobiły na mnie mniejsze wrażenie, niż sam styl.
  Jestem zachwycona twórczością Hall (jej opowiadania były jednak zupełnie inne; to zaskakujące, że jedna autorka potrafi pisać na tak różne sposoby).
• 
  sisterimapoet

  There is always a danger when you have such high hopes for a book. 'The Electric Michelangelo' was one of my favourite reads of 2004 and I quickly sought out Hall's previous novel. 'Haweswater' has been waiting on my shelves since as I was worried it might not live up to my hope.
  
  It did. And possibly exceeded them. This is straight up there as one of the best reads of this year. I'm not a great one for The Classics but this has the classic weight and tone that I do respect (like it says on the cover, it is very Lawrence). Its visionary whilst always staying grounded. People and places are weaved from vital sentences.
  
  Its a great story (I knew a little about the idea of drowned villages but this has brought the idea to life), exciting, interesting and profoundly moving. Hall manages to keep herself firmly within the characters minds and hearts never straying out into the territory of rights or politics.
• 
  Veronica

  I think it's just me -- I don't get Sarah Hall. I struggled to the halfway point and gave up. It just seemed dreadfully overwritten and portentous to me, laden with overdone symbolism to such an extent that however realistic the descriptions and setting, the characters didn't seem like real people, more mythic creatures. The encounter between Jack and Janet sheltering from the rain seemed directly lifted from the encounter of Aeneas and Dido in a thunderstorm in the Aeneid!
• 
  Jane Davis

  I make it my job to buy a book in an indie bookstore in every new place I visit. My choice in Sam Read's Bookshop in Grasmere was Haweswater. With Sarah's powers of description, I felt as if I carried a piece of the Lake District home with me.
  
  This is a story of a close-knit and insular community, the glue of which is the land their families farm, some for generations. A community of just 25 houses, a manor house, a pub, a church and a one-roomed schoolhouse, set in a stone valley. Into this community comes a man from the city, driving a shiny red motor vehicle. His message is that the few will have to make a sacrifice, so that the many are supplied with water.
  
  This is the not the first time that the men of the valley have been asked to make personal sacrifices. Several of them left this beloved country to fight in the Great War. Perhaps they fought so that they could protect this small and isolated valley. But Manchester Waterworks have bought the land, a law has been passed, and the farmers tenancies will not be renewed. They have no legal claim over the land. There are to be no awards of compensation.
  
  Janet Lightburn, a young woman who both shows great promise but is a product of her landscape, should not fall in love with the man from the Manchester Waterworks. Any other man would have done his job and left the building of the Haweswater dam to the engineers and the navvies. But Jack Liggett was not the man the people of Hawswater first had him pegged as. Coming from the poverty of the city, as a boy, he had jumped the train to escape from a violent father, and his destination had been the Lakeland fells. He wanted to see the Haweswater dam project through.
  
  This is a love story to the land and to a disappearing way of life. The secretive and sometimes violent collision between two of the novel's central characters is a perfect reflection of both the landscape, the unsettling time between the wars, and the pace of unstoppable change.
  
  This is a slow and thought-provoking read. Avoid if you like your fiction plot-driven and fast-paced.
• 
  Ron Charles

  Book lovers haunting the moors of literary fiction in search of another tryst as stirring as Wuthering Heights should embrace Sarah Hall's first novel, Haweswater. Although the book's tardy, modest arrival in the United States (four years after it first appeared in England, and now only in paperback) probably condemns it to obscurity here, this young writer has enjoyed extraordinary success in England. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Best First Novel Award, and her second book, The Electric Michelangelo, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. Ideally, American book clubs -- preferring paperbacks and perpetually torn between the newest releases and the classics -- will discover this lush, tragic story about the obliteration of a real-life village in the Lake District.
  
  Hall grew up in a farming community in northwest England near the Scottish border, not far from the Haweswater Reservoir. Built in the early 1930s, the four-mile-long reservoir was a cutting-edge feat of engineering at the time, but it involved flooding the little town of Mardale, where tenant farmers had worked and worshiped for centuries. Hall's novel, grounded in the stones and loam of this doomed village, is a celebration of that way of a life and a memorial of its passing -- unutterable sorrow balanced delicately with the intoxicating beauty of this place.
  
  The story is full of subtly drawn characters -- some introduced even in the final chapters -- but it revolves around Janet Lightburn, the daughter of a respected tenant farmer. She was born in a hail of curses from her usually devout mother, and something of that surprising anger hovers around her as she grows up. "Her ways were not in keeping with her youth or her sex," Hall writes. "She had developed a disturbing habit of staring at things, staring clear into them, so that her eyes never dropped during chastisement or argument." Despite her raw beauty, she vexes the young men of Mardale, who find her too intimidating, too smart, too manly.
  
  But then a stranger named Jack Liggett arrives in a new sports car, like something from another country, or even the future. "He was dressed for a dinner, or a dance, like an unusual, exotic bird," Hall writes, and he announced "a project so strange and vast that at first it was not taken seriously by the village." The farmers simply ignore the reservoir plans for months, as though it's too preposterous to worry about. But Janet "had both the intellectual dexterity of an adult and the reckless tongue of any youth running to catch up with their own life. . . . A volatile combination." She dives into the details of the project, exhorts the passive farmers to resist and finally confronts the dashing spokesman who has announced their demise.
  
  Their sparring bristles with wry wit, a touch of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Neither Jack nor Janet can understand the attraction to the other. "It could have been sheer mischance," Hall writes. "For there are times when passion can describe a random passage of its own accord, like electrical energy in the atmosphere which will strike out in any direction, seeking a high object to ground itself on." When that first strike finally hits, it's a fantastically charged moment -- cover your eyes, Jane Austen! -- erotic and rough. These two forbidden lovers keep at it secretly in the forest, under a waterfall, behind the barn, leaving them scarred and bruised, with pebbles ground into their shoulders and pine sap in their hair. Jack falls in love with her and the land he's pledged to flood, while Janet burns with conflicted passion for "this beautiful, hateful, loved man." It's "the sort of romance that shakes up history and devastates valleys." That it results in a climax of legendary tragedy is signaled in the book's opening chapter without any reduction of its final power.
  
  But their fated affair competes with another one just as passionate: the author's yearning for the village. Mardale is so beautiful that it seems to hover between our world and the land of myth. Hall never projects any modern-day environmental notions onto the past. Instead, she laments the loss of this valley with sentences that pass over the pages like a lover's caress: "In the morning the light was terracotta, a burnt orange lapping over the eastern fells. The road to Swindale was still eerie and unlit, twisting through trees on the steep valley side, soaked by shadow."
  
  During periods of drought, the remains of stone buildings still rise above the surface of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall's incantatory prose might call them forth again, too.
  
  
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
• 
  Jane

  In the early 1930s the Haweswater Dam was built to help to meet the increasing demand for water in the increasingly industrialised north of England.
  
  And so a valley was flooded. And two villages – Measand and Marsdale Green – were destroyed.
  
  The price of progress is high. Landscapes, communities and homes, all lost.
  
  And Sarah Hall brings all of this back to life, using words oh so beautifully. Images of farming communities, whose lives follow ways established generations ago, are sent against the rising tide of industrialisation, modernisation, and the demands that they bring.
  
  And then there’s the human story, a story that lays bare the emotional consequences of the flooding of the valley.
  
  Sam and Ella Lightburn have both lived there for all their lives. They have two children. A grown daughter, Janet, and a young son, Isaac. The family farm and the surrounding countryside makes up the very fabric of their lives. They know nothing else. They want nothing else.
  
  But change is inevitable.
  
  Jack Liggett is sent by Manchester City Waterworks to supervise the construction of the dam and oversee the evacuation of the valley. He appreciates the countryside and the community that he is come to, but he cannot save them.
  
  And so the stage is set.
  
  The characters are lightly painted, but it is enough. It is the emotions that are important, and they are vivid and utterly real.
  
  Janet, young, headstrong and desperate to save her home, is drawn to Jack, who must destroy it. A relationship grows, and deepens as the water levels rise and villagers begin to leave their homes.
  
  It is quite impossible not to be entranced by the story that unfolds.
  
  But it is clear from the start that this is a tragedy, and the building of the dam would have consequences that were utterly heartbreaking.
  
  But there was a glimmer of hope - and a new local legend was born.
  
  It is rare to find such wonderful images created and such wonderful storytelling inside a single book.
  
  Haweswater really is an extraordinarily accomplished debut novel.
  
  
• 
  Dana

  *Spoiler Alert*
  
  I was about to give this 3-stars, until being totally disappointed by the last 30 pages or so. Throughout, I had problems with character development and plot. She hooked me with initial descriptions of people, but then left much unexplored and no reason for some of the earlier narrative. It was like she was not totally clear which direction she wanted the story to go or which characters she wanted to focus on. I was willing to overlook this in light of what is still an engaging setting and story lines with alot of potential. However, in the final sections she kills off three main characters, only one of which has a sort of convincing reason why. It's really annoying, and any empathy or interest I had built up for the characters kinda vanished. Her later novels are much better - really liked Electric Michaelangelo - but this one I would skip.
• 
  Phill Featherstone

  I live surrounded by reservoirs, which nestle among the moors, drowning valleys that once were the centres of people's lives. So this novel about constructing a reservoir in Cumbria, designed to provide water for far away Manchester, appealed to me. The characters are beautifully drawn, and the tensions which tear the community apart are dramatically conveyed. The story is, I think, based on fact. Highly recommended.
• 
  Mitch Karunaratne

  Hall writes with an old soul. Her language is visceral and elemental. You can smell the lichen, feel the minerals in the water and touch the bark ridges rough under your hands. She’s taken a real event ( the flooding of a small northern village to create a reservoir to supply water to the city) and woven a human story around the event. How she connects her characters to the land is deeply moving.
• 
  Juliet

  Stunning. Exceptionally beautiful prose and an all pervading sense of threat make this an engaging and memorable read. Also includes one of the most heart-rending descriptions of grief I have ever read, I was welling up.
• 
  Kathryn Halton

  I cannot write a full review yet. I’m still processing the emotional impact this book has had on me.
• 
  Sophie

  There's nowt I love more in fiction than heartbreaking, devastating, brutality.
  
  Haweswater is beautifully written. Poetic almost. I had to stop several times to read aloud to my partner, I had to stop to catch my breath.
• 
  mentalexotica

  There is no question about it: Sarah Hall is an incredibly gifted writer. My only regret with this title is that I choose to listen to the audiobook rather than read it. And if there’s one thing you know about Sarah Hall, is that she is a writer for readers. What do I mean by that? Simply that her prose is elegant, visual, and visceral.
  
  The only way to truly enjoy the marrow of such fiendishly good writing is to immerse yourself - not unlike noise cancelling headphones - into the book. It means to cut yourself off from the outside world. It means to divest yourself of sound and distraction. For this is the kind of writing that demands, no, deserves your undivided attention. Do not listen to this book. Do not pick it up if you’re looking for a light read. Do not expect a casual dalliance. This is a commitment. It will ask of you your naked vulnerabilities, your lowered guard, your open wounds.
  
  This writing is resplendent and rich with the soil of what it means to be human. And what it is to love and live that love with every breath. Rarely do you come across the kind of passion that is shared between Janet and Jack - rarely in life, rare in fiction. Rarely are you drawn in by the shifting landscape of a place that is foreign to you and now feels like your own. It pulses and pulls. A book to take your time with, to nurse as you would an old single malt perhaps. Sit with yourself, be still, and immerse yourself into this absolute beauty.
• 
  Colin

  I came to the books of the Cumbrian novelist Sarah Hall rather late with the short story collection The Beautiful Indifference. That was her fifth book and it blew me away. Since I read it I've been working backwards through the rest of her work - How to Paint a Dead Man, The Carhullan Army, The Electric Michelangelo, and now, finally, her first book, Haweswater. All have a sinewy Cumbrian feel to them, and that is most pronounced in Haweswater, a novel woven around the real-life creation of the Haweswater reservoir in the north-eastern corner of the Lake District in the late thirties, the drowning of the valley and the village of Mardale, and the displacement of the local tenant farmers. This is a tragic tale told in beautiful, glowing prose. For a first novel it is an astonishing achievement. I can't wait to read whatever she comes up with next. In the small sub-genre of drowned valley literature, Berlie Doherty's Deep Secret, about the creation of the Derwent dams west of Sheffield, is also very much worth a read. C
• 
  Irene

  I read this book after discovering Sara Hall's second novel -- The Electric Michaelangelo -- and loving it. In this, her first book, you can see Hall's gift for crafting language but her pyrotechnical skills are much more subdued than in the Electric Michaelangelo. Perhaps that is an intentional part of the story. She evokes the time, place and characters of her tale beautifully. It is set in a remote valley in northern England, in the 1930's. It is a quiet farming community, both literally and figuratively. People don't talk much and not much has changed here over the years. Then word comes that a dam is being built and the valley will be flooded. Everyone must move. And with that the action of the book begins. Haweswater is slower moving and more mysterious than The Electric Michaelangelo. It didn't grab me as quickly or as strongly as her second book, but I enjoyed it very much nonetheless and would recommend it.
• 
  Kurishin

  This novel, in my opinion, attempts to manipulate the reader's emotions in a way that I do not find stimulating. It's as if I am not supposed to make up my mind about the various moral quandries posed in the novel. Rather, there's a clear answer that I should agree with. Because if we remove the moral aspect of this novel, we are basically left with a love story, which is another term for romance novel and that's OK, provided I was looking to read a romance novel.
• 
  Andrea Stephenson

  The story of a Cumbrian village and its inhabitants who will soon be displaced by the drowning of their land to make way for a reservoir. I'd heard great things about Sarah Hall, but struggled to get through this book. Though there is a strong sense of place and some enjoyable parts - particularly focussed on the character of Janet Lightman - I found it heavy on research as opposed to story.
• 
  Mary Catherine

  I couldn't get past page 40, unusual for me. I would be interested to know if other readers enjoyed this book and why. It sounded good but the author seemed so in love with her own prose that I felt I had to dig for the story - not worth it.
• 
  William

  As always Sarah Hall displays a tremendous ability to bring a region, an environment, a town to life, but the book suffers from shifting narratives and character focuses.
• 
  Lynn

  Beautifully written and very descriptive of the area in which it is set. But oh so gloomy and sad, there is not one whit of humour to counteract the sadness. It is pretty relentless.
• 
  Andrew

  If you are lucky enough to visit the Lake District any visitor will be overwhelmed by the beauty of a landscape that was created millennia ago however beyond the tourism and picture postcard views there is a story of rugged and resilient individuals who laugh love and cry in their homes farms and villages. In this book Sarah Hall , with wonderful prose evokes the complexity of an area which is both beautiful and forbidding while creating a cast of characters who are drawn with tenderness and a clear understanding of people whose living is tough but who respect nature and all it gives them.
  The story is based around the true events leading to the creation of Haweswater reservoir in the 1930's and the flooding of farms and homes in the valley of Mardale. Into the village in 1936 arrives Jack Liggett an engineer for Manchester water corporation who has to sell to the locals the idea of a venture which will destroy their community and livelihoods , and as tenant farmer seeing compensation going primarily to the landowner. Jack appears at first glance an arrogant city dweller driving his fancy red sports car and dressed as if for a posh dinner. Within the village are a cast of characters who are described vividly in one chapter from the WW1 veteran painter, to the Scottish pub owner, the local gossip shopkeeper and others bur central is the Lightburn family.
  We have met at the beginning Samuel and Ella with a dramatic scene of Ella giving birth to her daughter Janet and we have grown with Janet as she works with her father on the farm, battles with the force that is her mother, and through her schooling develops an acute intelligence which sees her as a strident voice battling the development. We also meet Janet's younger brother Isaac a boy who is obsessed with water and in a chance meeting allows Janet and Jack to be introduced.
  I will not go any further as any reader coming to this book afresh has a treat in store as we follow the lives of these individuals whose story completely captured my imagination and whose fate had me at the edge of my seat. I will also say that Sarah Hall with skill draws the construction of the reservoir and the men who work the site particularly the enigmatic Navvy's of whom there is one character at the end who is reflective of the contradictions in the land itself. I love a novel that draws on historical facts and enterprise in the telling of tale.
  Definitely one of my favourite books of the year , and it has me itching to put on my walking boots and head off to Cumbria for a walk in which I can see , perhaps with more perceptive eyes having read this novel, the wonder of the county and then hopefully reflect over a well earned pint in a pub ( obviously a dream more and more elusive at the moment).
• 
  bibliodufi

  Brutal, uncompromising, wild, glorious and very, very wet.
  
  "What could he say of this land, with its influence over his body and mind? Though he had heard of that certain healing quality before, from acquaintances who had been seduced by the beauty of the area, even from the infamous poetry which people absorbed as of it were a travel guide, he had never believed it reasonable, judging those protestations as sentimental and verbose. Only now did he begin to reconsider, to trace a marginal accuracy in the accounts, however loquacious and fanciful they might have been."
  
  I love the English Lake District and I admit that I am a hopelessly romantic nature lover. But I do know that even on the worst day's hike, falling into bogs and getting soaked to the skin or blinded by mist or hail, I am only playing at understanding its true, awesome power and I have massive respect for the people who work in it.
  
  "They think of you as a person without basis. One of those classless types who believes this place is about scenery and escape, and gettin' something out that hasn't bin put in!"
  
  Reading this novel you are truly transported to the raw nature of its landscape; its peat, mud, icy streams, rocky crags and majestic fells. You can smell the clear air and feel the freezing becks; you become a part of it just as Jack does - and you become a part of the village too; soaked in the dialect; a party to people's hopes and fears and listening in on the conversations (or lack of them!) in the fuggy Dun Cow.
  
  This novel paints a vivid image of the difficult, cold lives of those who work the land in 1930's Mardale, as well as those who come to build the dam that will eventually contain Haweswater. It is a fascinating look at how a small village confronts its end, after previous generations have lived there seemingly forever and it's an interesting slice of (fictionalised) history.
  
  A truly immersive read for anyone who likes to see beyond the popular, romantic ideal of this beautiful place but be warned that, like a long day out on a cloudy fell top where the rain and sleet can sting like needles, it can be tough going.
• 
  Sarah

  In this time of being restricted to spending time in small indoor spaces, my heart is craving the vast landscape, hills and skies of home so much. I have a feeling that much of my reading over the current weeks is going to be books with big hills and mountains, lakes and rivers and based around feelings of isolation and otherness.
  The book is set in 1936 in a small village in Westmoreland, which has one pub and village shop and hills full of isolated farms. It's been decided by an outsider from Manchester that in order to provide water to the towns down south, a reservoir and dam need to be created, which will flood the village and most of the surrounding farmland.
  As the farmers are tenants to a local landowner the locals have no choice but to accept that they will have to leave and find new farms to lease in other areas, regardless of how many years they and their ancestors have farmed the land.
  Into the small village come the outsiders who are to build the dam, bringing tension to the local community, invading the local pub. The main tension comes from the love/hate affair the Manchester planner has with a local farmer’s daughter and ends with death and the madness of grief trying to destroy the dam and to restore the valley to the way it was.
  The writing in this book is very dense and full of detail. There is a sense of otherness to the characters, from the “offcomer” responsible for the planning of the dam, to the local farmer’s daughter who is as comfortable helping her father with the lambing as reading the literature, to the brother who lies with his head in the ice cold becks for as long as he can. There is a feeling of impeding doom, not only for rural environment from the building of the dam but with the looming of the second war, when many of the farmers are just getting over the impact of the first one.
  
• 
  Holly

  A beautiful but insular village in England's Lake District will soon be covered w/ water when Manchester City Waterworks built a dam to supply reliable water to Manchester, a growing industrial city. The time is between WWI and WWII. The people of this village Marsdale live quiet lives. They largely work the land as tenant farmers; nothing has changed much in hundreds of years. It is a rough but rewarding place, and to be there is to fall in love with the environment. One family is at the center of this story, the Lightburns. Ella and Samuel have two extraordinary children, Janet and Isaac, born 10 years apart. Janet is the unique protagonist; she is uncontained, strong, opinionated, almost feral. When handsome city boy Jack Ligget arrives as a representative of the Waterworks, eighteen-year-old Janet and he have an affair.
  
  As other reviewers have noted, the book is beautifully written. (I wanted to pack my bags and visit this incredible place.) However, Hall's use of incomplete sentences was distracting and a detriment. I also struggled with the violent love affair; the book was a bit too much melodrama for me. Great passion struggling against great forces and great morality. The town capitulated almost w/o a murmur of protest, and the big, bad corporation, themselves too separated (intentionally) to have any moral quandary, moved forward ruthlessly. The little guys, from the tenant farmers to the inn keepers to the dam workers, didn't have chance.
  
  Hall's is a literary talent; the book is heavy w/ symbolism.
  --Water: the great flood, although in this case those living in the valley were righteous; water as rebirth; water as life-giving and sustaining; water as power
  --The inevitable cycle of life and death