Note for Note Book 5 (Scatter) sees the river finally reach the ocean, roughly one thousand years after the events of Book 1 (Plough). It is the modern era in which people move at increasing speed and with increasing sophistication and increasing brutality, but essentially make the same choices as their ancestors did, although the context is absolutely different. There is a global transfer of goods, of culture and of those displaced and seeking refuge, the extent of which has never been seen before, but to a large extent people have forgotten their connections with what has gone before, and this ignorance is a sometimes fatal disconnection.
The lives of a would-be patron of the arts and his partner connect with the lives of another couple, a painter and a dancer, in a harbour city where the mountain range also descends towards the ocean. These four people are further connected by the events that affect a homeless woman, a shoeshine man and a marginalised street artist. All of them are affected, knowingly or not, by the nature of events in the past, the influence of which changes the way each persons present comes into being in a blend of imagination, fantasy and substance. One of them will float out to sea.
