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| ‘I was probably quite an angry young woman’ … Fiona Mozley. Photograph: Hodder & Stoughton |
THE FIRST BOOK INTERVIEW
'I already feel like I've won': Fiona Mozley, the new face on the Booker longlist
Catapulted from anonymity to literary stardom, the 29-year-old from York talks about her sylvan debut novel, Elmet, and how it was fuelled by her anger at inequality
Richard Lea
Thu 17 Aug 2017
Fiona Mozley was sitting in a cafe when she heard the news. She had been out walking her dog by the river, and had stopped for a coffee on the way home, when she got a call from her editor.
“I thought she’d managed to secure a good quote for the front cover,” says Mozley. “It was obviously good news. I could tell from the tone of her voice.” The rest is a bit of a blur, with her dog, Stringer, barking and jumping around as he caught on to her gradually increasing excitement. By the time she put down the phone, Mozley was reeling from the discovery she had beenlonglisted for the Man Booker prize with a book that wasn’t even due to be published until September.
The novel that has catapulted her into Booker contention began on a train. Born in 1988, Mozley grew up in York, studied history at Cambridge and spent six months teaching English in Buenos Aires before coming back to Britain in 2011. After a year interning at a literary agency, spending most of her salary renting a room in a shared house in south London, she decided she needed to earn a little more money, so got a job as a travel agent.
But she was still homesick. Heading back south from York on the east coast mainline, she was thinking about a novel examining land, ownership and community, when she hit on the idea of a character – a great, hulking man, a larger-than-life figure from myth or legend. A first line came to her: “Daddy and Cathy and I lived in a small house that Daddy built with materials from the land here about.” By the time she arrived in King’s Cross, she had a first chapter and she was off and running.
Her book, Elmet, charts how John, a man-mountain who used to make his money as a bare-knuckle boxer and muscle for hire, retreats from his hostile world to a copse in Yorkshire’s West Riding. He makes a refuge for his children and teaches them to live off the land, foraging for berries, planting plums and potatoes, hunting pigeons and pheasants with bows and arrows whittled from oak or yew. But Daddy doesn’t own the land on which he has built his home, and, when the man whose name is on the title deeds pays them a visit, a confrontation begins that can only end in disaster.
This struggle over possession and belonging is recounted in stripped-down, granite prose modelled on Cormac McCarthy: short, declarative sentences and minimal punctuation. This straightforward style comes partly from imagining Elmet as a kind of Yorkshire western and partly from Mozley’s young narrator, Daniel.
“I had these very lofty social, political, environmental and cultural ideas, but Daniel has never read eco-critical theory, or gender theory,” she explains. “He’s not read Judith Butler, he’s not going to draw on that kind of vocabulary.”
Living with Cathy and Daddy in the copse, Daniel lets his hair and nails grow long, he wears his jeans tight and his T-shirts short. His sister likes to explore the woods and fields, but Daniel prefers to curl up with a book or make the house look nice. It’s not that he wouldn’t have called himself a man or a boy, he just “never thought about it”.
As someone who describes herself as queer, as “a woman, but with caveats”, Mozley says she “could never write a novel which didn’t have queer characters at its heart. I wouldn’t know how to write that novel. So it was always going to be there. That aspect was a conscious decision, but it wasn’t really a choice.”
Elmet is deeply rooted in the landscape of Mozley’s childhood, from the hare standing so still in a field it seems she has “grabbed hold of the earth and pinned it down with her at its centre”, to a winter morning with “summer scents … bottled by the cold”.
But the novel also bears the marks of the PhD in medieval history she is currently pursuing at York University, with a plot forged by changes in society that have played out in the north of England over hundreds of years.
“There’s this community that, at one point, all lived on the land and worked the land, and then were dragged from the land and into the mines or the mills because of the Industrial Revolution,” Mozley says. “Then the mines and the mills were no longer profitable, so we spat all these people out. But we don’t give them back the land, so what do they do?”
It’s an issue that is both timeless and timely, an issue the author says fuelled the novel with the anger she feels as part of a generation that finds itself “paying all of our salaries to other people for no clear reason”.
“I was probably quite an angry young woman,” she says – but living with a book as intense, as visceral as Elmet for more than five years can’t help but change you. “I was a much darker person when I started it, and I’m really not any more. I’m quite cheery.”
Mozley’s unexpected appearance on the Booker longlist has only further improved her mood. “It is overwhelming,” she says, “but I’m making a concerted effort to try and enjoy myself and take the positives from it.”
For a debut author whose book wasn’t even published when the list came out, it isn’t a question of winning or losing as “I already feel like I’ve won.” She remarked to a friend that as the shortlist doesn’t come out until September, she would at the very least remain in the competition until the autumn. But her friend pointed out that she’ll always be on the 2017 longlist. “Which I will,” she smiles. “I’ll always be in the 2017 Booker dozen, no matter what else happens. Pretty cool.”
- Elmet is published by John Murray Originals at £10.99
