Elmet

November 6, 2017
Mozley’s debut, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, is a rugged, potent work whose concentrated mixture of lyricism and violence recalls Cormac McCarthy. A taciturn giant of a man, a bare-knuckle fighter who is the “fastest and toughest... in Britain and Ireland,” builds a house for himself and his two children in the Yorkshire woods, where “the soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through.” In this secluded spot, he attempts to strengthen his two children, a slight, observant boy and an indomitable girl, “against the dark things of the world.” Dark things soon intrude as the family becomes embroiled in a bitter dispute with a villainous local landowner and his two entitled sons. That conflict generates overheated scenes of gore and overlong speeches that dissipate the novel’s power. There are nevertheless many eerily beautiful scenes, particularly one in which the grizzled father rigs up rustic Christmas lights deep in an ancient copse. Mozley is best when describing the tight-knit family in its isolated splendor, creating, and then clinging to, their “strange, sylvan otherworld.”

The dialect of northern England is a defining element in Fiona Mozley's kicker of a first novel, a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize. Narrator Gareth Bennett-Ryan gives just enough of that sound to draw the listener into her strange and savage landscape. At first, and for what seems like many minutes, we have only that voice--the voice of a boy in an identified place, time, and circumstance. By calculated degrees, we're brought from an atmosphere of mystery into a meticulously detailed contemporary northern England that is no less ungoverned and menacing than the worlds of fantasy and the supernatural that comprise Bennett-Ryan's usual repertory. In an unforgettable match of voice and text, Bennett-Ryan creates a distinctively accented and nuanced world that is equal and counterpart to Mozley's unique literary achievement. This memorable match of voice and text is a double pleasure, and a work of suspense unlike anything you've heard before. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine