Although Mulder and Scully never investigated the Loch Ness monster, the search for “Nessie” is one of the world’s most captivating—and most controversial—real-life X-files. Reported sightings of the monster go back to the 6th century, but popular interest in finding her began in the 1930s.
It is the mysteries of Nessie and those of the human heart that rest at the center of Sara Gruen’s At the Water’s Edge. As the title suggests, standing on a shoreline embodies the fluidity of ambiguity and certainty, the negotiation of self between one world and another, which the novel’s narrator, Maddie, discovers.
World War II frames the story, although you wouldn’t know it based on the lives of Maddie, her husband, Ellis, and their best friend Hank. Born into old Philadelphia money, the Fitzgeraldian characters are frivolous to the point of offensive silliness and are scarcely aware of the people around them, much less the thousands of men dying on battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. But the trio are forced to confront reality when, following a disastrously drunken New Year’s Eve party, Ellis is disinherited. Through an odd set of circumstances, the group relocates to Scotland in search of the Loch Ness monster as a means of redeeming themselves.
Maddie finds that life in wartime Scotland means living in a liminal space: a place between the United States, where she, Ellis, and Hank regularly boozed it up, and the frontlines of Europe. Yet she is surrounded by traces of the war all the same—a world of ration books, mandates to carry a gas mask and nightly war updates on BBC Radio.
Rather than relive the trivial life she knew before Scotland, Maddie embraces the society around her. Disgusted by her own cultivated helplessness, she attends to the inn’s housekeeping chores, learns how to cook and knits blanket squares for the soldiers. She finds herself at home in the midst of a fluid space, embracing the uncertainty as a call to live fully.
As Ellis and Hank leave Maddie alone at the inn for weeks on end in their hunt for the monster, she gradually becomes part of a more meaningful trio with Anna and Meg, two young women who help with the local war effort and run the inn’s bar at night. When Anna tells her, “I’m starting to think of you as one of us now,” Maddie reflects that it “might be the nicest thing anyone had ever said to [her]—and meant.” But Ellis and Hank are appalled by the changes they see in Maddie, accusing her of having “lost all sense of social structure and … having delusions” (a nod to classic Foucauldian theory of mental illness as social transgression).
Ellis, we learn, suffers from depression exacerbated by alcoholism and drug abuse. Maddie, who herself has been diagnosed with a “nervous disorder” and has contemplated suicide, has been prescribed sedatives to keep her calm, and Ellis avails himself of these pills in alarming amounts. As his behavior becomes violently erratic, Ellis plans to have Maddie permanently institutionalized.
While Gruen has aimed for period accuracy regarding mental illness, it’s ultimately a means by which change happens in the novel—an unfortunate, discomfiting plot device. More is to be expected from this thoughtful author.
Gruen is skilled, though, with revealing transition and change, whatever their sources. Her 2007 novel, Water for Elephants, is a sepia-toned meditation on the tension between reality and memory, as well as the vagaries of human relationships. In At the Water’s Edge, she focuses on the liberating power of social transgression. Like the loch at its center, Gruen’s novel touches on the heart’s own X-files—the Big Questions: What is love? What does it mean to value human life? And how do we discover our true nature in the midst of crisis and failure?
Shelley Wunder-Smith is a freelance writer and editor living in Atlanta with her husband and two cats.