Some men, when their girlfriends leave them, take up running or drinking. Taylor Canyon goes looking for whale vomit. That’s the premise of The Ambergris Trail, Dax Cornwell’s new novel. Canyon is a 27-year-old hotel linen porter in the fading Norfolk resort of Torc-next-the-Sea, kind of drifting through life. He’s convinced that a single lump of ambergris, “glorified whale vomit” as he puts it, worth tens of thousands of pounds to the perfume industry, will be enough to win back Maisy, the girl he has loved since he was thirteen. What follows is an odd but beautiful, and totally unforgettable novel about loneliness and obsession.
Moved out of Maisy’s fathers’ seaside house and into their mouldering caravan, Canyon spends the autumn of 2011 combing the beach at every low tide. He survives on reduced-price “yellow label” food from the local supermarket and the charity of Nigel, landlord of the town’s grimmest pub. Then, in the bargain aisle one night, he meets Jackie, a lonely woman who claims to be a psychiatrist, and against his better judgement offers her his spare room.
However, this turns out to be a decision he’ll greatly regret. Her brother Jerry soon follows, uninvited, and Canyon’s home is slowly “cuckooed”: taken over by people who use it, and him, for their own ends. As winter closes in, Canyon’s hold on reality begins to loosen, and his hunt for ambergris turns into an obsession that reminds me a little of Captain Ahab. As he admits later, “How can you walk a trail when you know it has no end?”
First off, this is a hard book to categorise, written as journalistic but actually literary fiction. The nearest comparison I can find is The Outrun, the book and recent Saoirse Ronan film adaptation about a recovering alcoholic on the Orkney coast. Both are fragmented, wind-blasted portraits of someone coming apart, where the sea is as much a character as any person. The author’s greatest gift is creating an immersive atmosphere. Within a few pages you’re inside Canyon’s head, and it’s a cold, cluttered, oddly beautiful place to be.
This is a book where the protagonist is definitely sympathetic, but not always likeable or rational. Canyon is often self-pitying and frequently delusional, yet it’s remarkably easy to care about him. He keeps doing good things against his own interests, most notably offering Jackie a room he doesn’t really want to give: “I might regret this,” he says, “my stupid big mouth talking well ahead of my brain.” Awkward, funny and heartbreaking, he belongs with literature’s great outsiders, like Holden Caulfield.
What I appreciated most was how the author doesn’t flinch from difficult territory and topics. Poverty, depression, self-neglect and suicidal ideation run through the book, and they’re written from the inside rather than observed from a safe distance. Canyon describes his depression as “the pervasive tar pit of what the doctors love to call clinical depression”, a place he has been “an honoured guest of” for as long as he can remember: “No matter how much I try to find ways to scrub it clean, I’m still coated in it.” It’s definitely a relatable book for anyone going through a tough time.
The cast is small, but every character feels real. Jackie is needy, warm and exhausting, sometimes all on the same page. Jerry is something else entirely: a charming, controlling presence who pays the rent and then behaves as though he owns the place. You’ll come to loathe him, and to will Canyon to find the nerve to throw him out. The book shows how easily someone lonely and hungry can be manipulated. Canyon’s fixation on Maisy and on whales is almost as worrying to watch.
The novel’s handling of sexuality is one of its most interesting threads. Queer characters are simply part of everyday life in Torc. Maisy has two fathers, and Nigel, the gay landlord, is Canyon’s closest friend. Canyon himself is never given a label. He insists that Maisy is the only person he can truly love, yet he’s increasingly drawn to Jerry, confessing “the strongest urge to stroke his cheekbones” and wondering whether what he feels is “Gender envy… Gender lust? Gender love?”
The writing is the real highlight of this book. On paper it should be insufferable, full of metaphors and asides, yet it never feels pretentious, because the voice so clearly belongs to Canyon, who has a beautifully lyrical, yet accessible way of expressing himself. The lofty language is how he copes, and Cornwell is careful to puncture it with self-awareness and humour. Canyon tells the teenage Maisy that the sea is his favourite thing “because she’s got all of life inside her”, then immediately concedes that “most things I said when I was thirteen were absolute bollocks.” I also found the casual reference to Tescos as Jescos pretty funny, and this kind of thing keeps the book getting too bleak.
The structure is just as inventive. The novel unfolds in short, diary-like fragments divided by tiny whale symbols, with poems and imagined letters from Maisy in between, and the chapter titles spell out A-M-B-E-R-G-R-I-S. I loved the author’s willingness to experiment and tell this story in their own way. A more standard third-person narrative probably would have made the book lack its distinct atmosphere.
The fictional Torc-next-the-Sea itself is brilliantly evoked, an out-of-season resort where half the Christmas lights don’t work, and nobody ever seems to leave. Canyon calls it “this sorry sack-of-shit excuse for a town”, and his running war with the tourists is one of the book’s great comic threads. He particularly resents families who take up the whole pavement. I found this relatable as someone who comes from a similarly dull town.
Most gripping of all is the slow unravelling of Canyon’s mind. As the weeks pass, he loses track of days, forgets what he has written (“I look at my notes, and I don’t remember writing down any of this”) and blurs what happens with what he imagines. Readers will be left debating how sane he is at any given moment, and how far he can be trusted. The final chapters even have a couple of twists that turn those questions into something you will be thinking about long after you finish it.
In sum, The Ambergris Trail is a strikingly original debut, with a distinctive voice, a vivid sense of place and a narrator who stays with you long after the last page. It’s bleak in places, but without spoilers it ends on a note of hope that feels hard-won but earned, and all the more welcome for it. I’ll be first in line for whatever Dax Cornwell writes next.
Final verdict: For fans of The Outrun, The Sea, the Sea or Moby Dick, or any darkly funny British literary fiction, this is an easy recommendation. Just come prepared for heavy themes, an unreliable narrator, and a story that’s oft as heartbreaking as it is funny.
You can get your copy of The Ambergris Trail here!
