The Drowning People by Richard Mason

Everyone alive today will or has already felt the haunt of growing old. We’ll all tremble at the thought of regrets and maybe even fear the sweeping hand of death. When we approach the end we will all look back on our lives, pose ‘what if’s to ourselves and wonder what would, should, could have been. The aging James Farrell is no different from us. He knows his time is coming; His judgement day is dawning. He also knows that what has happened has happened and no amount of urging will make his younger self choose a different path when entering the crossroads of life.
When James was twenty-one years old he was just breaking into life. He was embarking on an existence separate from the one he had shared with his parents for so long and he was finally becoming the man he had been waiting to turn into. There was no way he could have seen how life changing his meeting Ella in the park could be for him. Maybe if he had seen the devastating outcome he wouldn’t have sat down on the bench with her and maybe he wouldn’t have let himself be pulled into her tornado of family politics and hatred spanning generations. Unfortunately, all James saw was a gorgeous woman alone and seemingly distressed and, being the young man that he was, he couldn’t just pass up this opportunity. So began the downward spiral of young James’s life. But how was he to know?
The Drowning People is told from elderly James’s memories of all the events that led to his eventual and fatal punishment of his wife, Sarah. Due to the strange inner workings of the human mind, some of James’s memories are blurry and undefined while others that seem far less important are bizarrely sharp and distinct but what stands above all else is the truth and his firm belief that we will all be punished in the end.
Richard Mason constructs an extraordinary story with resounding themes of family, trust, hatred, justice and the overwhelming influence of love. The characters’ lives intertwine flawlessly and yet their very connections seem to be the cause of their eventual downfalls. At some times told in a voice dripping with regret and others times with a superiority that one could only feel when they’ve reached the end, The Drowning People exhibits Robert Mason’s expertise in the fields of human regret and that urge to reach back in time to just explain to your younger self all the things they should have known before they had to make the decisions of their lives. It’s spectacular writing with a haunting underlying reality.