Elmet

"Shortlist"

"Mozley’s book left me breathless, but not immediately. I reviewed it for the London Evening Standard , and so I received a copy in the post and I had never heard of this woman. I knew she was in her late twenties, and I knew that she’d written this book on her commute, on a train, and I thought, ‘Oh God.’ My heart slightly sank, and when I read the first few pages I wasn’t taken – I think the first few pages are a rather strained mediation on the Yorkshire landscape, Elmet being an ancient Celtic kingdom in what is now West Yorkshire. And because she’s a young writer I could hear the strains of canonical writers – a bit of D H Lawrence , a bit of Wuthering Heights in the descriptions of the wind-swept landscape up there. One of her central characters is called Cathy, and I thought, ‘Oh dear, is this going to be a bit derivative?’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But get beyond those first slightly ropey pages, and you get this really odd, wonderful and sad story, about two children who are taken out of ordinary life by their father, who is a fist fighter. He’s this hulking great thing – beautifully described as a sort of superhuman character, because this is how the children see him. We see the world through one of the child’s eyes, Daniel. He’s the son, and Cathy is the daughter. The narration stays with Daniel, a really sensitive boy in awe of this huge man. So the father takes them out of school and out of ordinary life to give them more options and more freedom. The mother is away, absent, and he builds a home with his bare hands in woodlands. It’s really lovely for a short time, because they’re living in this idyll, and their connection to the land is beautifully described. They live in a way that we stopped living in; they connect to the land in a way that in urban life we just don’t even think about anymore. So the novel is as much about that kind of relationship as it is about the human relationships and drama. “Mozley knows how to build things up slowly, turning up the tension to the point where we know he is going to burst off the page” But the father gets embroiled – the land that he’s built their home on is contested by powerful landowners. So there’s that strand, but there’s also the matter of the father’s capacity for violence, and that ripples beneath the surface for a very long time. We know it’s not going to stay there, but Mozley builds things up slowly, turning up the tension to the point where we feel he is going to burst off the page. And we know it’s going to end badly. We know there’s going to be some fatality. As it happens, there’s a huge surprise at the end – you would never guess that things turn out the way they do. I’ve always found novels told in a child’s voice to be filled with an artifice that, for me, rarely works. I don’t buy that voice. Daniel is a very sensitive child, sometimes quite an adult child, making observations that are perhaps too adult. And this is sort of what I meant about imperfections in the books. You forgive them because the writing itself is so beautiful. And in the meantime the tension is turned up so well and so thoroughly – at one point, when I knew something awful was going to happen, I had to put the book down and have a cup of tea, and just sort of calm myself down. Then, once I felt prepared for the violence that was going to take place, I picked it up again. Yes, this is a thrilling book about masculinity and fatal masculinity. The father is often called a Goliath, and he is. But he’s also a bit of a David fighting the Goliaths that are the landowners looking to dispossess his working-class family – so there’s a clever inversion there. Mozley captures a certain kind of masculinity that has been there since mediaeval times – since the days of Elmet itself – and which runs through to Clint Eastwood and that whole cult of the strong, silent, deadly man who we seem to find so attractive, but so horrifying too. The hero of the book is the father, but also the children. The difference is that the father is mired in this violent masculinity, too, so we know he can’t win in the end. This truly is a beautiful book. As I said, I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t think it needed to be. My favourite book, is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and that isn’t a perfectly written book either – that’s a big part of why I love it. It is a bit sprawling, and a bit all over the place, and melodramatic. Mozely does remind me of that and I can’t wait to see her writing and her storytelling develop."