On 15 April 1989, a crush on the dangerously overcrowded terraces at Sheffield’s Hillsborough football stadium at the start of the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest led to the deaths of 96 people, the worst disaster in British sporting history. Thirty years since the catastrophe, the trial of the former police superintendent in charge of the match recently ended with the jury failing to reach a verdict on the charge of manslaughter, although the safety officer in charge that day was convicted of breaching legal duty.
Hillsborough is the weeping sore at the centre of Helen Mort’s debut novel Black Car Burning, which is also a love letter to her home city of Sheffield and to the climbing community of the Peak District that surrounds it. Mort, an award-winning poet whose 2013 debut collection Division Street contained a poem about the 1984-85 miners’ strike, is also a climber: her second collection No Map Could Show Them takes the radical female mountaineers of the 19th and early 20th century as its theme. Politics and landscape are fiercely intertwined in the history of South Yorkshire, and Mort now demonstrates that she can write as assuredly on both subjects in novel form as in her poetry.
Sheffielders often claim that their city is built on seven hills, that there are more trees than people and that a third of the city is actually located in the Peak District. Mort addresses the unexpectedness of this very urban place, which despite its size and dominant high rises is abundant with woods and wildlife, surrounded by the gritstone ridges and moorland plateaux so beloved of paragliders and climbers. She sets her novel partly in the city and partly around Hathersage, one of Derbyshire’s most scenic villages: the Black Car Burning of the title is not an indicator of social unrest, but an arduous vertical ascent around nearby Stanage Edge. This ascent is an ambitious and potentially impossible objective for Caron, one of the three young women at the heart of the book, which is set around the time of the 2014-16 second inquests into the Hillsborough deaths.
For Pete, the fourth main character, the inquests revive feelings of impotence, guilt and hopelessness: “It wasn’t a surge. It was like a vice, getting tighter and tighter.” As a young police officer on duty that warm afternoon in 1989, he had witnessed the dreadful spectacle of the dead, dying and injured overflowing on to the pitch. Not long after, his wife, a talented climber and guide, died in an avalanche. Pete has retreated from the city, drinking heavily, working in an outdoor equipment store in Hathersage, where he begins to form a friendship with younger co-worker and climber Leigh.
Diffident Leigh is intrigued by the arrival of exciting risk-taker Caron on their patch. Caron’s partner Alexa, with whom she is in a long-term polyamorous relationship that is drifting apart, is a community support officer for the much-denigrated South Yorkshire police, her beat the “time bomb” of Page Hall, one of the most deprived areas of the city. The tensions between white Sheffielders, the established Pakistani community and Roma newcomers from Slovakia are sensitively drawn. As one elderly man explains to Alexa: “Nobody trusts each other any more. That’s the thing. There’s no trust. None at all.”
Trust is the keynote of the book – in Caron and Alexa’s shifting relationship; for starstruck Leigh; for Pete, estranged from his adult daughter and haunted by the evidential process after Hillsborough. Else-where the rivers, trees, reservoirs, cemeteries, hills, hospitals and Hillsborough stadium itself are given glorious disembodied voices, which provide eyewitness accounts from a drowned village, a quarry and the recent campaign to stop the mass felling of street trees in Sheffield.
Acting as both a threnody and a life force, these whispered confidences are studded with a poet’s observations, exquisite miniatures plucked from the grime: a cuckoo’s call is a “small god of unrequited love”, the setting sun is “like a piece of fruit, something fancy on the edge of a cocktail glass”. Sadness and solace interweave, as in the declaration of the river at Froggatt: “Today I’m like the surface beneath a mirror. I’m the colour of dark rock or of worn metal. I hold many things deep and close. A bedded tyre from a farm truck. A lost hair grip. The tins from a picnic, dirty with rust. And now I’m holding you.” Mort, in a beautifully accomplished debut, has blended a rich alloy: a deeply felt work of loss, time and healing.
• Black Car Burning is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
