Boater | Book Review

Boater: A Life on England’s Waterways

Jo Bell

304 pages

Paperback

Harper Collins

2025

ISBN: 9780008716295

Review

‘[The greatest difference between boat-life and non-boat life]…is not the sense of place, but the sense of time.’

Disclaimer: I love canals. They are a throwback to a bygone era of industry, but also one of the few places in cities where there is genuine peace. The world of the narrowboat is one of exquisite aesthetics – the eddies around opening lock gates, the sudden splash from a bank, the morning skeins of mist over the still water. I was always likely to be a sucker for Jo Bell’s book, and so it proved.

I think that Bell is able to bring about appreciation of these aesthetics because she is not a canal native. Formerly an industrial archaeologist and now a poet, she takes us on a journey encompassing her first faltering tweaks of the tiller and through many of the UK’s four-thousand miles of canal. On her narrowboat ‘Tinker’, we use her native landlubber eye to explore the quirks, peacefulness, and etiquette of life on a narrowboat (NOT a barge, she is careful to point out early in the book).Bell’s ear for cadence is apparent; much of the language is lyrical and has a lovely soft sense of humour running through it.

Occasionally I found myself drawn out of a lilting sense of narrative – there is an undercurrent of sneering at holiday canallers and rookie mistakes. Admittedly, this might have been guilt at having made some of these mistakes myself. I thought the book was weakest when there is an effort to manufacture elements of jeopardy. An extended anecdote about almost leaving the boat grounded on the sill of a lock, the resulting repairs, and a (admittedly entertaining) breakdown in the middle of a long, dark canal tunnel have the feeling of an editor asking for more peril, but these are minor quibbles and do not detract from a warm, comforting book.

Bell is at her strongest when she allows us to explore the elegiac, frozen waterways in winter, or when we see her retreating to her cosy narrowboat as she deals with the breakup of a relationship. She creates a sense of a friendly canal community and leads us through an exploration of the underground geography associated with canals – mercifully free of junction at road numbers and based instead around pub names.

The is a wonderful autumnal read.

*Thanks for reading. Image courtesy of ‘A Writer’s Life’. Find my other reviews below*

Perfume – Patrick Süskind

Hernan Diaz – Trust

Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White

Hilary Mantel – Mantel Pieces

Kevin Barry – The Heart in Winter

Lauren Oyler – No Judgement

George Mackay Brown – A Time to Keep

Sarah Moss – Summerwater

Stephen King – 11.22.63

Damon Galgut – The Promise

Francine Toon – Pine

Robert Winder – Bloody Foreigners

P. G. Wodehouse – Very Good, Jeeves

Michael Palin – Erebus: The History of a Ship

Hilary Mantel – The Mirror and the Light

Maggie O’Farrell – Hamnet

Raynor Winn – The Salt Path

Samantha Harvey – The Western Wind

Diarmaid MacCulloch – Thomas Cromwell: A Life

Peter Carey – A Long Way from Home

W.C. Ryan – A House of Ghosts

Val McDermid – A Place of Execution

Richard Cohen – How to Write Like Tolstoy

George Orwell – 1984

John Sampson – The Wind on the Heath

Michelle Paver – Wakenhyrst

Jess Smith – Way of the Wanderers

Zadie Smith – Feel Free

Max Hastings – Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975

Bernard MacLaverty – Grace Notes

Ernest Hemingway – In Our Time

Andrew Roberts – Napoleon the Great

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale

Kamila Shamsi – Home Fire

Annie Proulx – Brokeback Mountain

Anthony Doerr – All the Light We Cannot See

Ellipsis: Three magazine

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

Jon McGregor – Reservoir 13

Colson Whitehead – The Underground Railroad

Amor Towles – A Gentleman in Moscow

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Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, Down in the Dirt, and Shooter magazine. He has a Professional Doctorate in Education. Matthew blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.