Elmet by Fiona Mozley review – the wild card on the Man Booker longlist
Fiona Mozley’s Man Booker-longlisted debut is an elemental, contemporary rural noir steeped in the literature and legend of the Yorkshire landscape and its medieval history. Doncaster is the nearest orienting location, the geographic heart of the ancient kingdom from which the novel takes its name and on which Ted Hughes based the Remains of Elmet cycle of poems. Robyn Hode and his people’s uprising nourish the narrative. As Mozley’s narrator Daniel has it: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.”
Daniel and his sister Cathy live in a house they and their Daddy have built with their bare hands near the main East Coast rail line. Daddy’s name is John, but for Daniel and Cathy he is only ever Daddy. The contrast between this gentlest of paternal diminutives and the man himself – a bare-knuckle boxer of epic stature – casts into sharp relief the primal tenderness binding the three when the children wash and cut their father’s hair or share with him roll-ups and cider. Outsiders take a harsher view: “Others saw reciprocity and debts, imagined threats founded in nothing more than his physical presence.” That presence is excessive: compared with the bailiffs and fighters he comes up against, “Daddy was gargantuan. Each of his arms was as thick as two of theirs. His fists were near the size of their heads. Each of them could have sat curled up inside his ribcage like a foetus.”
Daddy’s “old-time morality” is essentially pre-Norman. He has no truck with documents or deeds, and has built his home on land he does not own. He makes sure to hunt humanely: the family shoot game with bow and arrow. Daddy has killed men, and speaks honestly with his children about this. His body, his strength and his wits are his truest possessions. He is direct in his dealings with others but the suspicion with which he is treated as a result has placed him outside society: “He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it.” This outsider status sets the family against venal landowners and employers and their cowardly lackeys, centred around the vulpine Price family who will prove their nemesis. The revelation of an occult shared history arcs the narrative towards tragedy.
Elmet possesses a rich and unfussy lyricism. Simple, homely food – baked potatoes and cups of tea – are described in such a way as to provoke longing. Dialect is put on the page with a deft touch: the way in which Yorkshire speech swallows the ends of words is most apparent in negative verb contractions, so we have “doendt” for doesn’t and “wandt” for wasn’t. Otherwise, the terms are unobtrusive: we are familiar with things going “tits up” and the occasional “wrong’un”. Above all, nature – flora, fauna, muck, blood and mineral – is lovingly described and allowed its head, whichever way that head turns. Daniel, who wears his hair and nails long and his T-shirts midriff-short, is seen by Daddy as a strange kind of boy because he enjoys domestic chores. Cathy, an electric and vengeful revenant of the Brontëverse, says to her brother: “I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?”
If there are minor deviations from an enveloping inevitability of tone and plot they come when the politics of gender or class are explicitly voiced through characters in whom they are already implicit. The obverse of this is that wickedness can be left slightly undersketched. The most potent sections of the narrative, such as a scene in which collective resistance is inspired at a gathering round a bonfire, free characters from the burden of didacticism.
Elmet belongs to a strain of northern British gothic that mirrors the variety that has long held sway in the southern states of the US. The gothic has always returned to us what we repress, whether that be monks hiding in priest holes or bodies buried in swamps. Those who have been socio-economically repressed – fighting men, former squaddies, Travellers – resurge in this rich, fabular novel, as does something more radical and doomed: a pre-capitalist morality. The embedding of such myths in the language and landscape of Hughes, dragged down from the moorland and into the woods, makes for a scarred, black gem.
Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack is published by Granta.
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