Searching for the Dark Other Side: A Review of Lindsay Hill’s Tidal Lock

We live in a world full of trauma and fear, where it’s often hard to confront, or even admit, exactly what has happened to us. The human mind is endlessly creative at finding ways to cope, though, and many of us don’t even realize the intricate web of fictions we’ve created for ourselves. Lindsay Hill’s new novel, Tidal Lock, explores this vast emotional space between what actually happened and what can currently be faced by one troubled, yet clever young woman whose name is “sometimes Olana.” In a sequence of short, titled passages that read more like prose poems than chapters, Olana’s nonlinear story unfolds.

Olana is in search of her “missing” father. But quickly we, the readers – and more slowly, Olana – realize that this story isn’t going to follow a straight line. Is Olana’s father truly “missing”? Where, and who, is Olana’s mother? There appear to be several candidates for that role, and Olana isn’t fond of any of them. And where is Olana, for that matter? Is the place of this story’s telling heaven or hell? Is it an abandoned movie theater, a town at the edge of Death Valley, or a city made of cardboard? Or is Olana in some kind of transit station? A place “between” what’s real and what’s not?

Tidal Lock is a jigsaw puzzle of prose where the box with the picture on the cover has been lost, so you must rely on the incremental placing of one piece next to another. Lindsay Hill is a master puzzle-designer, and while many of the small pieces may look alike, no two are identical. The titles of the 265 short passages in Tidal Lock are not all distinct, for example. Some, like “Needles,” “Fairy Tale,” “Trains,” and “Tracks” return as many as six to eight times, dropping hints to our subconscious. If Tidal Lock were a painting, it would be a wall-size Jackson Pollock abstract whose swirls and drips of paint were each made from perfectly clear, miniature realist Edward Hopper scenes.

Tidal Lock is full of short, intense passages that demand to be read out loud. They beg the reader to pause, and to ponder. Olana – and the entire world of Tidal Lock – exists on multiple planes. There is no apology for it, nor should there be. As Olana tells us in an early section titled “Doubling”:

“My father said having a single identity was like building a house around you with no doors. So doubling wasn’t lying exactly. It was just a way to find a way out of yourself.” (pg. 16)

Preoccupations abound in Olana’s world. Demolition sites, documentaries, midnight, language, and buttons – plenty of buttons. As a child, Olana cut buttons from people’s coats and collected them, marveling at their beauty. She finds them on the street, in debris. Broken or whole, buttons are the things that persist for Olana. They cast spells and conjure fairy tales. She even stalks “The Button-Chooser,” a mythical creature (a woman, of course) who works in a factory somewhere, doing the magical work of choosing buttons for garments.

Amid all these buttons, inside prose-poem chapters, individually titled, and often philosophical, it’s hard not to conjure thoughts of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Yet where Stein’s “buttons” are stream-of-conscious on the edge of nonsensicality, Hill’s are decidedly self-conscious and rational, though often thickly coded.

Particularly in the first portion of the book, the Tidal Lock narrative feels like a boxer warming up for a fight. Those short, prose poem sections jab and jostle us, this way and that. Even within a section, a scene, or a paragraph, there’s a persistent taunting. The voice is breathless – often filled with em-dashes – no time to wait for a comma, or a period.

“Do you think the dead can love more fiercely than the living – alive to loss as they are – being dead – alive to every foothold being fragile – the taken for granted hold you have on things – every taken for granted handhold in the world – like the way the living can fiercely love the dead but in reverse? Nothing is taken for granted by the dead. To love like that is what I’m thinking of.” (from a section titled “Mirror of the Dead,” pg. 11)

Hill establishes an intimacy with the reader through multiple instances of near-direct address, ultimately breaking the fourth wall completely as the narrator reveals the meaning of the title of the book:

“In case you haven’t already looked it up – tidal lock means not being able to see the other side of something. You can’t see the other side of the moon because the moon is tidally locked with the earth in its orbit for example. Venus and earth are tidally locked. No one knows why. Things you can’t turn from – things you can’t shake – how the past turns its single face to you – how all you can’t remember lies on its dark other side.” (from a section titled “Tidal Lock,” pg. 63)

Tidal Lock is a short and powerful novel, with deep poetic leanings. It’s about family and loss, and soulful searching. The most surprising thing, to me, given how thickly coded the book felt at the beginning, is how thoroughly the story finds its way to clarity in the end. Secrets are revealed; and the reasons for the heavy veil become clear as well.

Tidal Lock is not a book you will quickly forget. Nor are you likely to want to immediately frame and hang your completed jigsaw on the wall. If you’re like me, once you turn the last page, the beginning will call to you again. To return, to revisit, and to see the dark side of the moon, finally, through knowing eyes.