Cold Fish Soup by Adam Farrer
Review by Gary Kaill
‘I’ve been speaking to a man about a werewolf at Bempton Puffin Sanctuary,’ Adam Farrer tells Jim, a friend of his mother’s, at dinner while visiting his parents during Christmas 2019. Home for the holidays in Withernsea on the Holderness coast, Farrer finds himself, as ever, both baffled and entranced by the ingrained peculiarities of his once-adopted home town. And despite having been successfully funded to write a book about the area, he finds himself hobbled by the classic ‘basic relationship failure’. Paused at a cliff edge while walking his beloved rescue dog Millie, Farrer contemplates the icy waters below. Only the random intervention of iTunes pulls him back from the brink. ‘You can’t kill yourself to [Prince’s] “Starfish and Coffee”,’ he concedes. ‘You can’t kill yourself with your dog.’ Quite.
Jim, sadly, is far from enamoured by Farrer’s stumbling thoughts on what might supply local colour for his developing project, but that’s Jim’s loss. For Cold Fish Soup is a darkly comic wonder: a memoir that deftly outlines the sorrow left behind by personal tragedy while at the the same time pausing to acknowledge that beneath every disaster lies a bedrock of (potential) laughs — for those who dare to confront them. Farrer, on this evidence, is a diarist as fearless as they come, particularly good at mining small town curiosity for its freakish appeal.
Farrer, a stalwart of the Manchester literary scene, won the 2021 Northbound Book Award with the manuscript for Cold Fish Soup, and it’s not difficult to see why. He documents his own personal history with guile and candour but it is the tenderness with which he introduces his family that enriches the reading experience. Forced to move from their native Suffolk to Withernsea in 1992 for his father’s work, he begins a relationship with the area that continues beyond his eventual relocation to Manchester several years later— one as rocky as its constantly eroded coast.
Farrer has an uncanny grasp of his chosen form’s mechanics. Switching mid-paragraph from one disquieting observation to a prime piece of self-deprecation, he writes with a suppleness that gifts his stories a winning momentum. Cold Fish Soup is a work conducted in close-up but one possessed of great scope. It emerges as a gnarly companion piece to Amy Liptrot’s delicate ode to Orkney The Outrun (Farrer is no less skilled at freeing the knots that the effect of place can have on one’s sense of identity) and Adam Buxton’s Ramble Book (an ostensibly silly exercise that ends up having much to say about the unexpected interconnectedness of grief and humour.) So, while Farrer spends time detailing his mother’s national fame as a Britain’s Got Talent finalist with her burlesque troupe, his time spent with worryingly committed paranormal investigators, and his own hapless teenage band years, beneath it all thrums the event that provides the book’s emotional axis.
He documents the suicide of his older brother Robert with an unnerving frankness. From teenage battles, to an eventual loving and complex camaraderie, Farrer preserves his memory with great generosity: ‘It sometimes seemed less like he died and more as if Hollywood just stopped writing him.’ The spot where Robert took his own life becomes, as the book draws to a close, less a weight to carry and more a jumping-off point as Farrer, free of the constraints of lockdown and settled into a new relationship, dares to contemplate his own next chapter. And with that, the book performs a canny shift: from eulogy to elegy.
‘It’s not always like this,’ he tells his girlfriend Emma on a miserable day during her first visit to Withernsea. ‘Nowhere is always like this,’ she replies. And as they pull away from the coast and begin the drive home, Farrer makes a choice in that moment that will rattle even the hardest of hearts, the book’s closing line a poignant and deeply moving distillation of all that has come before. Cold Fish Soup is like nothing else you will read this year: a lyrical and courageous exercise in uncovering one’s own personal history, and one that takes the sword to its author’s contention that he inevitably makes everything about him.