Elmet

The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up 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.

The epigraph for Elmet quotes Ted Hughes describing the Elmet region as, “The last independent Celtic kingdom in England...even into the seventeenth century...a 'badlands', a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” This lawless land of “Robyn Hode”, therefore, is a prime setting into which first time novelist Fiona Mozley (a PhD candidate studying the decay of medieval villages and eco politics) could situate a story that illustrates her own progressive philosophy; anyone who cheers the bandit against the tax collector or the squatter against the landowner, even into our own times, is sure to nod along knowingly. Mozley writes beautiful sentences – capturing nature and humanity both – and it would be easy to thereby conclude that she has written a beautiful book, but I'm left underwhelmed. I reckon it's the politics that caught the Man Booker jury's attention; that and a sweet-natured protagonist whose story we hope ends well.

Elmet has a timeless feeling – it could almost be set in the Middle Ages or in some post-Capitalistic dystopia; some place where power resides in the hands of a few wealthy landowners and the little guys have no recourse in the law. As it happens, this is apparently set in Margaret Thatcher's England; so, same difference. I wasn't familiar with her government's Right to Buy initiative, but in a nutshell: People living in subsidised Council residences are given the right to buy their homes at a large discount. And while that might sound like a policy that would help poor people get ahead, in Elmet, this has led to their further exploitation: When these new homeowners found themselves unable to keep up with their mortgages, wealthy men stepped in to buy their homes from them; raising the rents and evicting residents on a whim; refusing to maintain the properties as the Council used to. As area jobs dried up, these same wealthy men, all large farm owners, exploited the locals in another way: Mostly preying on ex-prisoners and other welfare recipients, they would hire these men for farmwork at a pittance under the table, and if anyone tried to complain, the landowners would go to the authorities and have their dole cut off; maybe even evict them; maybe get their fatcat friends to evict their friends and family in neighbouring villages. This story is firmly set in the worst excesses of Capitalism; the proletariat is sure to revolt.

I'm paying to live on a piece of land that we, all of us, used to own together. And I can't see reason for any of it, any more.

It is in this world that we meet our main characters: John Smythe is a gentle giant of a man when with his family; an undefeated bare-knuckle boxer out in the world. After having his two children raised by their grandmother (the kids' mother dips in and out of their lives, always returning home when she's bloody and broken, though we never learn why), when the grandmother dies, “Daddy” decides to claim a remote lot of uninhabited woodland and build a house upon it in which to care for his now teenaged children. This also feels timeless; with the family hunting food and handmaking furniture, it could equally be the distant past or some near future. When the rightful owner of the land shows up to complain, I suppose we're meant to cheer as Daddy organises the locals into a rent and labour strike. Helpfully, this Price character is a cartoonishly evil oligarch who speeds up his car when pedestrians are crossing the road and who lets his two sons run rampant as Medici princelings; it's easy to mark him as the bad guy. Unhelpfully, the particular plot of land that Smythe squats on used to belong to his wife (aha, a family claim?); a plot that Price overpaid for in order to help the woman out when she was desperate for money (how could Smythe therefore make a moral claim to this particular plot? The fact that it “should” be his right must be Mozley's point.)

When Elmet begins, we're in the mind of John Smythe's son, Daniel, as he follows the railroad tracks in the aftermath of some calamity. It is fourteen-year-old Daniel who narrates the story, all of what came before with a few glimpses of what's happening in his now, and his gentle and poetic observations are a contrast to the brutishness he sees around him: Daniel is nothing like his brawling father or his tough older sister Cathy. With the characters of Daniel and Cathy, Mozley is able to explore gender expectations and those people who would buck the norms, and for the most part, this was handled well – for the most part they just are who they are. Living out in the woods, it doesn't occur to Daniel that others might find it funny that he wears his hair and nails long; that he likes to wear tight jeans and crop tops:

You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy. Of course, if you had asked me I would certainly have replied that that was what I was. It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I had no reason to think about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. I did not think of Cathy as a girl nor as a woman, I thought of her as Cathy. I did not think of Daddy as a man, though I knew that he was.

On the other hand, sixteen-year-old Cathy has had to protect her little brother for her whole life, and the idea of growing into a helpless woman disgusts her:

Daddy won't always be around. And even if he is, it's my life and my body and I can't stand the thought of going out into the world and being terrified of it, all o' the time. Because I am, Danny, I am. And I don't want to be. I don't want to feel afraid. All I kept thinking about was Jessica Harman, thrown into that canal, and all those other women on the TV, in newspapers, found naked, covered in mud, covered in blood, blue, twisted, found in the woods, found in ditches, never found. Sometimes I can't stop thinking about them. Sometimes I can't stop thinking about how I'm turning into one of them. I'm older now and soon my body will be like theirs. I didnt want to end up in a ditch. I didnt want that any more than you want to be a fighting man like Daddy, or a labouring man, out sorting potatoes on a farm all day until your limbs get caught and broken and chopped in the dirty machinery, dirty iron and dirty steel. We all grow into our coffins, Danny. I saw myself growing into mine.

Because of Daniel's intermittent story in the present, we have an idea that the events of the past will culminate in tragedy; and when this climax is reached, it's cinematically over-the-top (but certainly kept my interest). Yet Elmet isn't really about a realistic plot – it seems more fable-like than reality-based – and while I would also decry the concentration of capital in the hands of a few and the inequity of income disparity and the helplessness of poverty (I'm no fatcat), this isn't a story set in the shades of grey; the only actual crimes were committed by the little guys (to the cheers of the Occupy Movement). The book this one most put me in mind of was Jim Crace's masterful Harvest (about a medieval village adjusting to the Enclosure Act; the last time period in which this kind of squatting for ownership would have been deemed legal in England), and as an allegory for the unfairness of the concentration of wealth and power, Harvest worked where Elmet strained my patience and my credulity. If there ever was a more equitable system in the past, even one of Mozley's characters doubts it, saying, “There are dreams, Ewart, and there are memories. And there are memories of dreams.” I guess the only solution to Capitalism is to burn it all down.

Elmet has its share of beautiful and insightful passages, the format built narrative tension and interest, but I didn't believe in the plausibility of the plot; it had the overall weight of a YA novel. And as the plot seemed in service to a progressively political point-of-view, it all feels like so much virtue-signalling to me; as does this book's inclusion on the Man Booker Prize shortlist; three stars can be considered a rounding down against the rest of that shortlist. Interesting article about Mozley and Elmet here.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves