The Lock-Keeper's Lament: A Satire of Two Eras

About this book:

On the sluggish, cabbage-scented waters of the Junction Canal, 1854, the British Empire is measured in inches of water depth and drams of smuggled gin. Master Lock-Keeper Bartholomew Flathers guards his stone trough with a ledger of grudges, a spine of ash, and the conviction that God made canals on the third day and railways are a delusion of Irishmen in dirty trousers. His nemesis, Ephraim "Sly-Jack" Pegg, pilots the *Water Witch* with a theology of momentum, a nose reddened by devotion, and sixty gallons of untaxed malt spirit hidden beneath the tallow. When a grounded timber raft forces a collision that showers the towpath in oak logs and illicit liquor, their war of paperwork versus pilotage erupts just as a black iron dragon screams across the valley on the new Great Western line—thirty miles an hour of progress that neither man is ready to accept.

From the weighing-house wager to the great dredging disaster, *The Lock-Keeper’s Lament* follows the canal’s final, glorious summer through a cast of navvies, excise men, drunken lock-keepers, and a horse named Prince who operates on instinct and buttercups. With a satirist’s eye for bureaucratic absurdity and a novelist’s love for the muddy, magnificent particulars of a vanishing world, the novel charts the collision of wooden thought and iron rail, where every lock gate swung is a rearguard action against the future.

Sharp as a windlass key and deep as a lock chamber, this is historical fiction that wears its learning lightly and its humor heavily. For readers who love the canal-side comedy of early Terry Pratchett, the social texture of George MacDonald Fraser, or simply the sight of a pompous official hoisted by his own brass buttons, *The Lock-Keeper’s Lament* delivers a voyage worth every penny of the toll.