Set against the 1984 miners’ strike, James Clarke’s first novel The Litten Path won the 2019 Betty Trask prize and made itself at home with poverty, localism and landscape. Hollow in the Land explores similar territory, but shifts the action from a Yorkshire pit village to a valley in Lancashire, somewhere among the clusters of towns and islands of moorland. Thirteen fragmentary glimpses of valley life follow the contours if not the map: the novel emerges from these stories, as an oblique but steadily focusing picture of the way things are.
Moody eccentricity prevails, often at the edge of violence. Contrasts between fantasy and realism flicker like the light on the abandoned quarries, the ailing sawmill, the dingy pubs. In the chapter called “Field Mouse”, Jim and Lenny, a boy of 11 and a girl a little older, befriend the drunk former sailor from next door. His house is smelly, full of poorly stuffed animals. He shows off his “staff” with its hare’s-skull handle; his wrist, tattooed with a set of numbers beneath a complicated compass design – the key, perhaps, to some underland from the imagination of Alan Garner. In a children’s book he would be their guide to an occult layer of the world. What he’s a guide to here is quite different.
If “Field Mouse” is a fantasy story with the fantasy scraped out, “This Strange Light” is a policier with the crime ground down to a mark on the surface. Annie, a London cop, tired and disillusioned, returns to the valley for her Aunt Rosie’s funeral. We suspect from the start that something is not right: the story seems reluctant to tell us what, though it’s willing to admit to a mysterious stain on Rosie’s bedroom wall; and Annie’s sister, who inherited the house, is full of an inexplicably restless energy. Meanwhile, in “Black Ice”, Benj, a man who recently finished a prison sentence for causing death by dangerous driving, pursues Dani the optician, whose husband has died in an industrial accident. Benj and Dani are full of mourning wonder and repressed rage at how their lives ended up. Grief in the time of alcohol and MDMA pivots slowly and then suddenly from self-examination into repetition-compulsion.
Everyone in this novel is having an affair or suffering from something – skin diseases, allergies, brain damage from a fall off a quarry truck; perhaps just a simple puzzlement. They have been drunk since they were kids. They live between work, or the lack of it, by day; and, by night, at Brooklyn’s Wine Lodge, where on a Friday the bouncer is a member of “the valley family you wanted to mess with least”. They are all suffering static flight reflex, but it has given them a sense of humour, a distanced recognition and tolerance of other people’s flaws – an outlook that flip-flops from kindness to violence and back again across a round of drinks.
Where The Litten Path focused on the miners’ strike and its immediate effects on a community, Hollow in the Land occupies itself with the deindustrialisation and impoverishment that washed across the north afterwards. Though the authorial voice is as forthright as the characters’ own, implication outweighs directness. The structure of each episode finds a means to look slightly away from its own denouement – sometimes the reader is left wondering what they have missed. At first the prose seems a little uneven from section to section, but as you read, your appreciation of Clarke’s grip on method and material increases. His images are startling and often startlingly apt: a solicitor suffers a heart attack, “sliding off the bench in the garden like scrambled eggs from a plate”; roses are “shrivelled into little clumps of burnt cellophane by the winter”.
This is a novel about belonging. The pressure to leave the valley, to find something – anything – somewhere else, is held in tension with the urge to return to its struggling hair salons and gloomy rains, its hillside ruins that resemble “the beginnings of a misspelled word”, where you face the inevitable penalties for your disloyalty. The hollow in the land is a zone of wrong decisions and deaths by misadventure. It’s only 10 miles long but it stretches to fit your life, binding the generations together even as it pulls them apart. You must take these characters as you find them. Without pulling punches or closing his eyes to anything, Clarke makes it possible to do that, in a novel full of insight, empathy and wry laughter.
Hollow in the Land by James Clarke (Profile Books Ltd, £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
The main image on this article was changed on 4 May 2020 to one more appropriate to the book being reviewed.
