The effect of Tirra Lirra by the River

First, a confession. I am not coming to this novel fresh, as an adult reader with some kind of firm, if hard-won sense of self from which to survey the world. I read Tirra Lirra by the River at school 30 years ago and it entered my blood in such a way that I cannot remember a ‘self’ before this book was part of it. To come back to this book now is to prod—possibly to dislodge—a small but crucial foundation stone in the rickety edifice of me.

From the vantage point of my now 47 years, it seems that the years between the ages of 13 and 23 constitute a dangerous decade. We form our tastes, especially literary and sexual, by what we come across—or what comes across us—then. This decade is dangerous in a duckling kind of way, for the retaining of impressions, the unknown setting of patterns, that are then, apparently instinctively, followed. Anderson’s narrator Nora Porteous has a startling moment when she recognises this. In mid-life she chooses, apparently freely, a shipboard lover—a squat-bodied, concave-toothed man—but then recognises that he is, in fact, an uncanny physical echo of a teenager with whom she had played an inchoate sexual game during her own dangerous, duckling decade.