The Swordfish and the Star by Gavin Knight review – Cornwall’s dark, dangerous side

Gavin Knight’s previous book, Hood Rat, was a vivid, if impressionistic, evocation of gang crime in some of Britain’s grimmest postcodes. Knight not only embedded himself in police crews working the frontline of this unofficial war, but spent hours winning the trust of gang members, and those affected by their crimes. Instead of then producing an impartial, journalistic account, he wrote something drawing on fiction techniques to speak in the voices of those he had interviewed. So where a reader might have looked for hard facts and statistics, they heard instead of a drug dealer’s concerns for managing his business, the marital crisis endured by a copper and the innermost thoughts – in the form of a monologue, in effect – of a young hitman.

The aim, clearly, was immediacy and authenticity, but some reviewers were upset by the conflict between this approach and the way the book was marketed as true crime. For his next, Knight might seem to have taken a far cosier option, immersing himself in the fishing communities of west Cornwall.

Magnificently rugged when it’s not picture-postcard pretty, Cornwall continues to attract so many holidaymakers that its population all but doubles from spring to autumn; it is one of the few regions where water pressure is turned up not down in the summer. Tate St Ives, the Eden Project, a host of music and book festivals, world class surfing, superb restaurants and the international successes of Poldark and Doc Martin, have helped the region become a sophisticated tourism destination far removed from the rough and ready, wooden surfboard scenes of my 1970s childhood holidays. It’s now as likely to attract childless professionals as the bucket and spade brigade.

But precisely because this temporary population is so numerous, visitors often leave with a sunny version of Cornwall that ignores another, harsher, reality. In fact the county is the among the most deprived regions of the UK and includes one of the poorest towns in the EU. Of the industries that made its name – tin mining, china clay and fisheries – only fishing has survived and the combined forces of dwindling stocks, EU quotas and savage industrial competition from foreign trawlers mark it as an industry in steep decline. Despite receiving substantial financial support from the EU Cornwall voted 56% in favour of Brexit.

Most Cornish fishing villages, including Cadgwith on the Lizard, where Knight has gleaned about a third of his stories, have succumbed to the siren lure of second-home syndrome: locals are unable to resist inflated offers for quaint old houses, but in selling up see their sons and daughters priced out of their birth communities. Bakeries become art galleries, a sail loft becomes “The Old Sail Loft” and a tide of tasteful heritage paintjobs marks the ineluctable replacement of a smelly, dangerous industry with an ostensibly fragrant, risk-free one. Village after village has gone this way. Port Isaac, Mevagissey and Polperro may retain excellent fishmongers and a handful of fishing boats in their harbours, but look up from those harbours on a miserable night in late March or early November and most of the domestic light will come from the newer housing on their fringes.

Newlyn, to the immediate west of unspoilt Penzance, is an exception and continues to host Cornwall’s principal fish market and busiest commercial harbour. It’s there that Knight clearly did most of his research, notably in the two pubs of the title, which stand just yards apart across the road from the fish market and Seaman’s Mission and, indeed, between an art gallery and spanking new art house cinema in a converted crabbery.

Knight has gone in search of old smells and danger and found them in spades. There are extraordinarily evocative stories here, of the mad bravado of scarred, de-fingered fishermen and the stoicism of their women. Some of the stories are little more than jokes or anecdotes, like the much adapted St Just Prayer (“Dear Lord, We hope that there be no shipwrecks, but if there be let them be at St Just for the benefit of the inhabitants.”). Others take far longer, weaving in and out of the book’s freeform narrative tapestry, like those of Martin Ellis (AKA Nutty Noah) who set out singlehandedly to revive the 19th-century practice of ring netting to bring in entire shoals weighing upwards of four tonnes; or Nick Howell, another revivalist, who not only brought back pilchard fishing and canning but wisely rebranded the fish as Cornish Sardines so as to see them sold in M&S and Harrods.

Knight bravely tackles the Stevenson clan, who effectively had the Newlyn fish market sewn up, since they not only owned most of the fleet but the crucial ice machine as well, but then fell foul of a Marine Fish Authority investigation when they were found to have taken part in a “black fish” scam: illegally landed fish were being brought to market with false documentation that claimed they were something else in order to avoid fishing quotas. There are hair-raising stories aplenty – of horrific accidents at sea, often the result of human error brought on by exhaustion, of alcohol-fuelled violence in the pubs of the title, and of the trade in hard drugs, which, notoriously, has long shadowed that in fish. The narrative net does not only take in the fishing trade but heads across West Penwith’s peninsula to include stories of rough justice meted out to a known rapist in St Just (dangled head first into an old mine shaft, apparently) and the notoriously business-minded folk on the north coast in St Ives.

West Penwith has a long established artist’s colony, dating back to when Stanhope Forbes and Henry Scott Tuke began persuading fishing folk to pose for them and progressing through Ben Nicholson’s excruciatingly patronising enthusiasm for the naive work of St Ives fisherman-painter Alfred Wallis. Knight’s book embraces both these and the desperately sad tale of Barbara Hepworth and Nicholson’s acolyte, Peter Lanyon. It’s entirely characteristic that several of the characters depicted here end up turning from fishing to art or, indeed, to whatever can be sold to the incoming tide of heritage paint users.

There is a long tradition, dating back via Daniel Defoe to the intrepid, if judgmental, 17th-century travel writer Celia Fiennes, of the Cornish telling tall stories to citified travellers over their evening drinks, and not all the stories told to Knight will be strictly true. (I lent my copy to my echt Cornish farmer husband and there was much harrumphing as he turned the pages, but that may have stemmed in part from the equally long Cornish tradition of mistrust between farmers and fishermen.) But then, Knight never sets out to be coolly objective. Rather he simply allows his ear to be bent by whoever buttonholes him in the pub. If you want rambling Cornish tales marshalled within a coherent argument, you might be happier with Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground. Knight’s unregulated tone and slidings into quasi-fictional territory will not be to every reader’s taste, but as a cross-section of west Cornish lives, a celebration of brave eccentricity and a prose illustration of the way those lives overlap and interrelate, The Swordfish and the Star takes some beating.