Everything Will Swallow You, a Review

It has been quite a while since I read Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox (@dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social) and I intended to write a Review fairly immediately but I paused until there was some kind of order to all of the responses and thoughts I had.

This sounds very self absorbed but it is a book which has that kind of effect, to keep considering and rolling it around as to how to understand what it does and then write about my response.

It is about friendship, not just the friendship of the two main characters, Eric and Carl, and their nearest friends but the friendship of strangers and others. Even cheery and motherly sweet shop managers, vinyl vendors and bookshop proprietors and yet more.

It carries the similarities and differences between collecting and hoarding, curating and piling up along in its flow. And there are the extremes of acquisition in the use of books and magazines as architecture within a comfortably decaying house like buttresses and pillars.

So it is not that surprising in such a disordered delicate jumble of set pieces that there is an enigmatic being of magical realism described simply if not matter of factly. The exact nature of this most important friend is largely left to the reader, 'somewhat dog like but extraordinarily elegant like an afghan, very decidedly aquatic at times', and to me a great deal of the selkie.

The book flows in eddies and circles and abrupt waterfalls, some of those eddies are of place and some of Time and the possible different perceptions of time, most especially of the dog like, sometime aquatic friend. Has he seen these different times himself, does his existence have its own repeating great circle? Certainly he has had at least two great lives with different but very connected people.

But with all this there is the ordinarily extraordinary life of Eric which allows Tom Cox to explore the nooks and crannies of when the Music and Life was better and perhaps life in general was better, continuous and consistent with how we lived.

And to do this there is the element of the Commonplace Book, snippets of To Do Lists, Notebook entries and Record Albums that could have existed by bands that should have been. To show along with the sparkle of magical realism, the harsh light of science fiction, the context from the future, a future wounded and needing new myths it is all very normal.

In 19th century novels and somewhat later there was the device of the Afterword, What Happened Next, Are They Alright? Something to round off the novel especially for the Reader, to give them the feeling that there was a place for everything and everyone. We still have it, generally in stilted 'there was all this to explain, but I didn't' and in films the after main credits and before the list of all the skills, artisans, software and music that made up the film post scene. But the post scene is more about getting the audience excited in the next film and a pitch to the studio to make the next film.

Tom Cox doesn't do that. He uses another literary character that is proxy for a real character, Fred the Crow. Fred has some definite opnions, he takes flight and we follow him a little above and to the right so we can see all that he sees as he flies. He flies over the landmarks, the houses, the lanes, beaches, record shops, cafes and sees what has moved on, or stayed nearly the same and every place evokes the events or conversations that happened at some point in the novel. Then Frank comes upon Eric and Carl and their friends in the cove and it becomes clear that an important conversation has happened and Carl has made a decision, enters the water and then makes another decision, or another cycle begins. Or however you as the reader understand it.

Yes this ending, the device and its pleasing ambiguity sticks for a long, long time. As do other scenes. He has a knack of finding the right glue.

So this is a Recommendation you will be better in some particular way after reading Everything Will Swallow You, because it does what it says on the cover.