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Fiona Mozley Photo by Heidi Stoner

Review: 'Elmet,' by Fiona Mozle

FICTION: A gripping, disquieting first novel set in Yorkshire, which was shortlisted for Man Booker Prize. 

By Malcolm Forbes Special to the Star Tribune
JANUARY 5, 2018 — 11:49AM

The outsider on this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist was, appropriately, a novel about outsiders. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel “Elmet” follows a father and his two children as they beat a retreat from an intolerant and uncaring society and forge a new rural life for themselves in a small copse. However, peace comes at a price, and in time the family’s “strange, sylvan underworld” is besieged by hostile forces hellbent on tough justice.

The book takes its name from an ancient Celtic kingdom that covered what is today part of Yorkshire. For her epigraph, York-born Mozley quotes from Ted Hughes, who in his “Remains of Elmet” poems referred to the area as a former badlands, “a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” Though set in the present, Mozley’s novel re-creates that lawless realm and reinterprets the region’s medieval history. The result is a dark, rich, timeless fable.

Mozley’s main characters are narrator Daniel; his “hawkish” sister, Cathy; and their hulking father, always referred to as Daddy. After Cathy is reprimanded at school for standing up to school bullies, Daddy whisks his children away to begin again far from the madding crowd. He builds a house and teaches the children how to plant and forage, and hunt for food with bows and arrows. He also enlists Vivien, one of their few neighbors, to school them. “She’s going to teach you things what I can’t. She’s good at things what I aren’t.” When cash is required, Daddy takes part in bare-knuckle fights, always winning. “The violence,” Vivien explains, “he needs it. It quenches him.”

The family lives off the land — “land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries.” The problem is the land isn’t theirs. Mr. Price appears on the scene to repossess what he claims is rightfully his. For a while he is kept at bay. But when he suffers a particularly heavy loss, the finger of suspicion points at Daddy — at which point a vengeful Price decides these outcast-misfits haven’t so much outstayed their welcome as overstepped the mark.

The main narrative of the novel is routinely intercut with short sections — italicized, vignette-sized — each an update on Daniel’s search for a missing Cathy. We come to read with mounting dread, bracing ourselves for a devastating conclusion. Mozley doesn’t disappoint. Before getting there, though, there is a great deal to appreciate, even wonder at. Mozley dexterously balances scenes of harsh cruelty and visceral brutality (not least a bloody fight that is all muscle, gristle and spilled teeth) with quieter, ruminative interludes, such as the fate of the siblings’ mother. Landscape is vividly mapped; characters are simultaneously magical-mythical (Daddy the “bearded giant”) and strikingly real; and the local dialect lends a musicality to each exchange (“He indt there”; “there wandt owt I could do”).

“Elmet” is bleak but beautiful, earthy yet airy. Mozley has emerged as an exciting new talent.

Elmet, by Fiona Mozley

 Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Elmet

By: Fiona Mozley.

Publisher: Algonquin, 312 pages, $15.95.

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Alex Preston’s best fiction of 2017

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Alex Preston’s best fiction of 2017

George Saunders’s moving Booker-winner lived up to his masterful short stories, Salman Rushdie turned his gaze on America, several debuts dazzled, and then there was Hollinghurst and Pullman…

Alex Preston
Sunday 3 December 2017

 

This was the year in which George Saunders – long recognised as one of the masters of the short story – took on the novel. Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury £18.99), set in a Washington cemetery over the course of one tragic night, was a worthy winner of the Man Booker. Focusing on Lincoln’s grief at the death of his beloved son, Willy, the story is narrated by the carnivalesque ghouls who inhabit the graveyard. It’s as wildly imaginative and profoundly moving as anything I’ve read for a long time. Joining Saunders on the shortlist was another Great American Novel, Paul Auster’s 4321 (Faber £20). While it wasn’t roundly praised by critics, it feels like the kind of book that will endure – so much of Auster’s extraordinary oeuvre comes together in this long and intricate tale, which manages to remain fresh and dazzlingly original.

Fiona Mozley

 (Hodder & Stoughton £10.99), was a surprise inclusion on the Man Booker shortlist, but it’s a cracking read. Darkly lyrical and full of violence, Mozley’s Yorkshire owes something to Ted Hughes, something to older, deeper folk tales and fables. She’s a name to watch. Another shortlisted book, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Hamish Hamilton £14.99), casts a magical realist spell on the horrors of the migrant crisis, taking us into parallel worlds and through portals, the narrative strung between London, Greece and west‑coast America.

Two magnificent books missed the cut from longlist to shortlist on the Man Booker, but did find themselves on the Costa shortlist. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury £16.99), her seventh and best novel so far, is a retelling of Antigone set in a contemporary London riven with racial tensions. A heart-rending book that makes the political intensely, painfully personal. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate £14.99) confirms him as one of our best novelists. It’s haunting and peculiar, a book that continues to rattle around in your head long after you put it down. A series of brilliant BBC radio broadcasts have been spawned from the novel, and it was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize.

Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach, ‘a book of epic sweep and ambition’. Photograph: Pieter M. Van Hattem

There were some superb novels that didn’t get picked up in the lottery of the literary prizes. Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (Corsair £16.99) tells a story of Depression-era New York through the waters that swirl around it, dredging up forgotten tales of the city’s maritime past. This is a book of epic sweep and ambition whose heroine, Anna, diving beneath the waves, is a memorable figure. Egan’s work has always been difficult to pin down, playing tricks with narrative conventions and the reader’s expectations. This feels like her most approachable novel so far, in places as daring and unusual as A Visit from the Goon Squad but with more of a story and a heart.

Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (Little, Brown £16.99) is a knuckle-gnawing novel of marriage, money and country life. Witty, vicious, dark and unsettling, it’s a book that has finally propelled Craig to her rightful place at the top table of contemporary novelists. It manages at once to be blackly funny, deeply touching and full of edge-of-your-seat suspense. I’m not sure I’d read it straight after The Lie of the Land, but Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (Profile £12.99) presents a similarly bleak vision of married life. About the absences that lie at the heart of even the closest relationships, this novel matches its desolate subject matter with luminous, lapidary writing.

Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House is a ‘vivid and convincing’ portrait of contemporary America. Photograph: Rajanish Kakade/AP

If you’re looking for something a little more upbeat, Elizabeth Day’s The Party (4th Estate £12.99) starts off jolly enough – a group of well-heeled friends gathering for a 40th birthday celebration. Things sour quickly, though, and amid the champagne and cocaine the plot builds towards an almighty twist. Offering a nice transatlantic counterpoint to Day’s novel is Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (Jonathan Cape £18.99), the tale of an immigrant family on the make in Obama’s America. Carrying whispers of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Godfather, but still brilliantly, inimitably, a Rushdie novel, it’s one of the most vivid and convincing portraits of contemporary America I’ve read.

A new Alan Hollinghurst novel is always something to celebrate, but The Sparsholt Affair is a particularly joyful thing

There were a host of fine debut novels this year, not least among them Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (Wrecking Ball £12) by Adelle Stripe. The fictionalised story of the short life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, it’s a beautiful period piece of 1980s Britain, as funny and sad as anything by Dunbar herself. Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot (Jonathan Cape £16.99), delighted me every bit as much as her earlier nonfiction book about Russian literature, The Possessed (2010). Her young Turkish heroine, Selin, manages to be both very clever and entirely naive. It’s worth searching out American War (Picador £14.99) by Omar El Akkad. Future dystopias always tell us a great deal about our most pressing contemporary anxieties and this is a novel that imagines the cracks currently emerging in US society widening into ravines. Also in translation (by Megan McDowell), Samanta Schweblin’s nightmarish Fever Dream (Oneworld £12.99) is a book to read in one frantic sitting – bold, uncanny and utterly gripping.

Finally, two books that ought to be on every prize shortlist next year. A new Alan Hollinghurst novel is always something to celebrate, but the sumptuous The Sparsholt Affair (Picador £20) is a particularly joyful thing. Funnier and lighter in touch than 2011’s The Stranger’s Child, but sharing many of its predecessor’s concerns about the passing of time and literary posterity, it’s hard to imagine anyone not loving this novel. The same might be said of La Belle Sauvage (David Fickling £20), Philip Pullman’s first book in his The Book of Dust trilogy. It’s a stunningly good read and shows that truly great literature renders questions of genre meaningless – this is not just a masterpiece of children’s fiction, it’s a masterpiece, full stop.

• This article was amended on 4 December 2017. It’s the French edition of American War by Omar El Akkad that is translated by Laurent Barucq; the original is published in English

THE GUARDIAN

2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist: the best and worst lines

17 OCTOBER 2017 • 12:59PM

Ahead of the final verdict, we bring you the dazzling highs (and cringe-making lows) of this year's candidates.

Paul Auster on 4321

Emily Fridlund on History of Wolves

Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

Fiona Mozley on Elmet

George Saunders on Lincoln in the Bardo

Ali Smith on Autumn

What makes a Man Booker novel? / Fiona Mozley on Elmet

What makes a Man Booker novel? 
Fiona Mozley on Elmet

Ahead of the announcement of the 2017 prize next week, the stories behind the stories

Paul Auster on 4321

Emily Fridlund on History of Wolves

Mohsin Hamid on Exit West

Fiona Mozley on Elmet

George Saunders on Lincoln in the Bardo

Ali Smith on Autumn

Saturday 14 October 2017 08.00 BST

Fiona Mozley on Elmet

Fiona Mozley. Photograph: Hodder & Stoughton

Several years before I started Elmet, I began writing a novel about a group of friends who were newly graduated from university and attempting to make their way in the world. It was narrated by a woman, taller than average, with reddish hair, glasses and literary aspirations. Let’s call her Leona Bozley. Leona had moved to London and was living in a shared house. She went to coffee shops a lot. She spent a great deal of time thinking about her feelings and discussing politics. She had relationship “drama”.

I never finished this novel and I never will. I cringe when I think about it. The plot was dull; the main character vapid (it turns out that my own personality does not translate well to the page); and most of all, I hated writing it. The life I was fictionalising was not bringing me very much pleasure, and describing it, then reading it back, was not especially enjoyable either.

I had used my writing as a kind of therapy. Although this is not a problem in itself – many of my favourite writers do something similar to great effect, and I have read several novels in the last year that are clearly autobiographical and absolutely wonderful – it didn’t work for me. I wrote pages of monotonous monologue and pulled my punches whenever something remotely interesting happened. I knew that if I ever wrote anything else, it would have to take me away from the familiar. It would have to transport me.

Elmet tells of characters whose experiences are very different from my own. It is narrated by a 14-year-old boy, Daniel. His father, known as “Daddy”, is a giant of a man who fights for pay in bareknuckle bouts. His sister, Cathy, is ferocious and unpredictable. Their lives are not comfortable but precarious. They live on the margins of society and are desperate for some stability and a place to call home. They build a house for themselves by a copse in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but they do not own the site and, inevitably, the landowners, a quasi-feudal oligarchy, begin to circle.

Since Elmet’s publication in August, I have been asked frequently where these characters and this story came from. There are certain answers that are easy: I was inspired by the landscape of home. This is true. I grew up in York, just north-east of the contested territory, an area in which I used to cycle with my dad and which was partly encompassed by the catchment area of my school. The origins of the plot are less easy to pinpoint. The rhythms, tone and narrative arc are explicitly those of a western, as are many of the characters and the concerns at the novel’s core. Land. Men. Violence. These are the hinges. However, when I began writing there were also a plethora of social issues I wanted to explore. I am not certain this is the best way to start a novel, but I did not necessarily know if I would ever write another, so, perhaps naively, I decided to give it a go.

Indeed, when I think back on the many competing ideas I decided to include, it surprises me that the novel has any sort of coherence at all. For one, I wanted to examine the tensions between certain political agendas. I resolved to set up a situation where the principal concerns appear to be those of class, labour and property ownership, but for that to all give way when the expectations of gender come to be tested. I likewise tried to create moments in which the limits of the human body are presented alongside cultural conceptions of those limits. Cathy, a teenage girl, is terrified by the prospect of becoming the victim of male aggression. Growing up, girls are confronted by images, often romanticised, of assaulted or murdered girls, and I suppose I wanted to touch upon the psychological impact of these vignettes. Cathy is tormented by the apparent inevitability of violence, and much of her energy, and the energy of the novel, comes from her endeavours to overcome this.

There were, then, competing interests and lofty ambitions. If Elmet were going to work as fiction, if it were to entice and entertain, it required a narrator thatwho observed rather than interjected, and who hinted at these ideas or conveyed the sense of them unpretentiously, without proselytising. Cue Daniel, the lost boy.

Elmet is published by JM Originals.

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker prize 2017 longlist led by Arundhati Roy's return to fiction

Fiona Mozley / I wrote a novel on my commute — now it might win the Booker Prize

Elmet by Fiona Mozley review / The wild card on the Man Booker longlist

'I already feel like I've won' / Fiona Mozley, the new face on the Booker longlist

The 2017 Man Booker Shortlist Is Heavy on Americans and Debut Novelists
Surprised by the Booker shortlist? Don't judge the books, study the judges
My writing day / Fiona Mozley / I’m on the Man Booker shortlist and top of my fantasy football leagueWhat makes a Man Booker novel? / Fiona Mozley on Elmet
2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist / The best and worst lines
Review / 'Elmet,' by Fiona Mozle