O brave new world

Justine Jordan on The Testament of Yves Gundron, Emily Barton's dazzling debut

The Testament of Yves Gundron
Emily Barton
303pp, Canongate, £9.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Read the first chapter

In this dazzling fable of progress in miniature, Yves Gundron, yeoman farmer of the remote village of Mandragora, asks us to imagine the aeons of undifferentiated time before technology gave humankind the leisure for desire, contemplation, travel and doubt. Like his forefathers, he scratches a meagre living from the soil: furrowing the fields with his fingernails, pulling puny loads of produce to market on a one-wheeled cart bound to the throat of a straining horse. The horses don't survive long, and neither do the villagers: though they pray fervently to God and spit to ward off evil spirits, they daren't name their children until they achieve their first birthdays. Then, one day, Yves invents the harness, and "the present as we know it began".

To the modern eye, the consequences of Yves's breakthrough unfold with the inevitability of hindsight: bigger carts, paved roads, the joys of speed and purposeless driving, for which Yves must invent a new name: "Pass-Time". And although this feels like a time-travel narrative, one of us soon steps into the tale: a young American anthropologist, the "editor" of Yves's testament. Ruth Blum has grown up with stories of the mythical Mandragora (its dreamlike name a nod to the narcotic powers of the mandrake root), a rumoured hamlet on an island off the coast of Scotland, "tucked like an egg in the middle of a nest of mountains" and undiscovered by the modern world. As she breathes with wonder when she hikes into the annual village fete, with her immodest clothes and shockingly white teeth, "a tumour . . . all reds and purples like raucous spring flowers, and sprouting everywhere shiny protuberances and black tendrils" on her back: "They're having a Renaissance fair, only they're not."

Yves is extremely relieved when Ruth takes the cancerous rucksack off, and, ignoring the villagers' misapprehensions, invites her into his home (where she stares about so, he assumes she's never seen a house before). There she begins her study of pre-industrial society. Yet despite her determination not to "mess with my data set", her unwitting hints of brakes and double axles threaten to develop her thesis subject out of existence, and an unsettling love affair blossoms in her footnotes to Yves's text. Meanwhile, "the Beyond" comes calling in the shape of a crashed airplane and the US soldiers sent to investigate its disappearance.

Barton ploughs rich comic material from Ruth's unwonted toast and toothpaste, while Yves's wondering narrative allows her to bring a delightfully fresh eye to the accustomed marvels of the modern world: a photograph "a wafer bearing a remarkable likeness", a tape recorder a loaf of bread "with the gentle whir of a distant mill wheel". As Ruth realises to her shame, she is as unable to explain our technology as Yves is to comprehend it. The villagers, of course, study Ruth too: Yves's brother Mandrik, a holy man and the only Mandragorian to have travelled, begins a treatise on the broken postlapsarian language of the stranger, with its "sharp bursts", ubiquitous umming and phatic repetition, and draws grave conclusions about the state of her soul.

It's remarkable that The Testament of Yves Gundron is only a first novel. Barton effortlessly combines a numinously convincing recreation of peasant society and a sci-fi sensibility for cultural conflict with a delicate fable of the Fall, as Yves takes us from the time of his grandfather's grandfather, "when the darkness was newly separated from the light", to his first awful realisation that his life has "somehow ceased to be enough". Yet this is also a surprisingly suspenseful page-turner; as "the future rushes forward to devour us" and it becomes gradually clear that Mandrik has been less than truthful about his travels in the Beyond, Barton's narrative gusto speeds the reader with ease past some hard-to-take twists in the tall tale, and she invests the inevitable conclusion with a nicely judged ambiguity.

Her imaginative daring extends to the playful rhythms of the villagers' parlance, cries of "yo", "land, schmand" and extempore blues ditties scattered among their quasi- King James Bible speech. There's also a most unfashionable reverence in Yves's worshipful prose, his language imbued with love for both the natural world around him and the visionary realm of loss and regret. Rich in emotional depth and intellectual curiosity, this generous, strangely ego-free novel finds sweetness and clarity in "that state of affairs we had never known to call Peace".