This Man Booker 2017 shortlisted book is the debut from British author Fiona Mozley.
Centered around narration of past events from 14-year-old Danny, the story takes place in a grim North England copse where Danny and his older sister, the tough Cathy, live with their bare-knuckle fighter father John, in a house built with their own hands. Living in a near-feral world of lawless farm workers on ancient woodland, John makes a living in the circles of tinkers and travelers, bringing home cash for the family’s self-sufficience. But there is a thread of doom that runs inside the tale, and soon, people will come.
Danny in the present is searching for someone, wild and roaming roads and dales, picking up rides with sexual predators in trucks to get to the next part of his journey. Why Danny is let loose without his family in the now portions of the narration is worrying and dark.
The land is a living being, a character, and the spirit of the earth seems to underpin everything in the story, and is the reason for all. Danny’s history runs through this land. What happened to his mother is merely hinted at, while murder, missing people and death, as well as violence against the trees, people, and the animals they hunt and eat are their norms. Vivien, an older neighbour who seems to have a deep connection to John, lives inside, with a home, teacups, and lace lingerie. This is an escape for Danny, and speaks to a place inside him. Her house is a place he can read books and learn things about the world she lives in, but he only slips through like a ghost, living “outside.”
All of this is promising, but there are issues here. The POV seems odd. We are being told the story by a young boy, and yet sentences glide into the purple often; the author doesn’t question her own poetry. At one point, Danny refers to his beloved sister as “the girl” for no good reason, other times he waxes lyrical with massive words I didn’t even know myself. This is a semi-feral boy, and I can’t believe Vivian trains his language to that extent in a few hours’ reading a week. He just sounds like an adult who reads a lot.
All seems to be going in a more magical, gothic direction until suddenly in the last act, I felt myself slipping into a bad TV script for one of those blindfold-and-gun episodes The Walking Dead loves churning out. Dialogue falls into trope, as does action, as the baddie drones on telling telling telling, and the image given for Cathy, the iconic image, is lost in a mass of stage directions and unknown “men with guns”. The style of the prose also suffers in the last act, falling to genre novel quality, something thrillery and crass. There’s also a loss of story resolution. If you write in animals and don’t kill them, tell us what happened to them. The dogs, although named and full members of Danny’s family, are said to have gone, and this is the last we hear of them. Nobody looks for them. A bugbear of mine, ruining the ending for me.
I have a feeling that there are many subtle foreshadowings that I missed because the author didn’t bring them back later, and expected the reader to hold every detail and match them to other details later, but this was unsuccessful. The parts in the now with Danny confused things a little. More of these would have been a Get Out of Jail Free card for the author to tell. But the author did not use this gift she gave herself, and as a result it feels the book is slightly undercommunicated. Maybe we would have been better in the now from the point of view of Vivian, the only character to live outside their world, who could have anchored us to the story.
While these issues did spoil the read for me, the book does offer a lot in terms of imagery and the raw in English nature, as well as capturing much of the rural North. The passing lives and traditions of other communities and Danny’s were brilliantly imagined, with colour, flavour, texture, and emotion. It can only be a start of a stellar trajectory with Mozely’s writing, and the next book from her should be something to behold.
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