This title
came to my attention because it was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
and because it appeared on a number of “best of 2017” lists.
Fourteen-year-old
Daniel and his fifteen-year-old sister Cathy live with their father John in rural
Yorkshire in a house which he built for them.
Daddy, as both of his children call him, is a bare-knuckle fighter of
massive size but he is the proverbial gentle giant with his children. They live in a “strange, sylvan otherworld” where
he teaches them to be self-sufficient: “He
wanted to keep us separate, in ourselves, apart from the world” (48). They have an almost idyllic life until the
arrival of Mr. Price, a man who claims to own the land on which their home is
situated.
Throughout
the book, there is a feeling that their peaceful existence will not last. Daniel understands that “Everything [Daddy]
did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark
things in the world” (82 – 83). The
author excels at creating tension. When
Mr. Price first visits the family, he says to John, “’Your children must be
lonely away from school and anybody of their own age. . . . I’ll bring my boys
up one time so they can make some friends’” (81). His two sons have just been described as “two
handsome, slick lads” (76, 77) so that innocuous statement is full of threat.
Characterization
is a bit problematic. Cathy is fierce,
resourceful and fearless. Though she is
pretty, she is very much a tomboy who wants to be like her father. She takes Daddy’s lessons about
self-sufficiency to an extreme; when Daniel asks her why she didn’t speak to
her father when young men were bothering her, she says, “’Because it were my
thing. It were my problem to deal
with. I can’t always go to Daddy
whenever anything happens. I have to be
able to deal with things by myself. . . . And Daddy won’t always be
around. And even if he is, it is my life
and my body and I can’t stand the thought of going out into the world and being
terrified’” (272). There is a dark side
to her personality; Daniel mentions that “a pretty face might not be closed
around pretty thoughts” (7) and she tells her brother that she is angry all the
time (149). The problem is that she
seems too mature; at one point she tells Daniel, “’No matter what they do to
me, what happens to me. I’ll be
fine. In my self, I mean. They can do their worst and I promise you I’ll
go somewhere else in my mind’s eye, for as long as I need to, and I’ll be
fine. An experience is what you make of
it. If you tell yourself that it means
nothing, then that’s exactly what it means. . . . But if something happens to
my body. Well, I am able to put myself
in such a position that it’s like it’s not really happening. And if it’s like it’s not really happening
that means it’s not really happening’” (278 – 279). This does not sound like a teenaged girl to
me. And don’t get me started on her
almost superhuman power in the climactic scene.
Price, the
landowner, is portrayed as pure evil. He
lacks compassion, exploits the poor, and takes revenge on anyone who opposes
him. He feels he is above the law; John tells
a man that in a dispute with Price, he would never involve the police: “’And I wouldt involve police anyway. They belong to Price around here too. Big ones anyway. Police chiefs and councilors that I’ve seen
driving up to manor’” (131). There is one scene that shows he prefers his
enemies to have a slow death (294). He seems to
have no redeeming qualities so he comes across as
an almost cartoonish villain
with no real depth.
Daniel is
the narrator and in his case, it is the lack of consistency that is an
issue. When he speaks, he does so in
plain and simple language, usually in Yorkshire dialect: “’She wandt very welcoming. . . . I mean, she
was and she wandt. She was polite and
helpful. As much as you’d expect’” (61). When he describes nature, however, he uses
lyrical language that differs so much from his conversational diction: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories
that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed through the
undergrowth and back into our lives.
Tales of green men peering from thickets with foliate faces and legs of
gnarled timber. The calls of
half-starved hounds rushing and panting as they snatched at charging quarry. Robyn Hode and his pack of scrawny vagrants,
whistling and wrestling and feasting as freely as the birds whose plumes they
stole. An ancient forest ran in a grand
strip from north to south” (5 – 6). This
is not the language of a boy who has had only sporadic schooling.
The book is
in many ways about class conflict, rich versus poor, landowners versus
tenants. Daddy, for example, claims
moral right to the land: “’Means nothing
to me. . . . It’s idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a
piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and
dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he
can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper. That’s part which means nowt to me’”
(202). Daniel even says, “I could not
help but feel that [my father and his friends] were dancing in the old style
and appealing to the kind of morality that had not truly existed since those
tall [Anglo-Saxon] stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only
in dreams, fables and sagas” (143). John
may be a strong man who can defeat all opponents in a physical confrontation
but otherwise he is really powerless because he is a member of the poor class.
The climax,
when it comes, is over-the-top in terms of violence. It reminded me of violent scenes in the Coen
brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men. The
book could use a warning sticker about excessive brutality.
The book is
bleak. It keeps the reader in suspense
but leaves much unexplained. Though this
debut novel has the weaknesses of a debut, Mozley is a writer with potential whose
future work I will read.
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