A review: Elmet
To paraphrase an old joke, “How can you tell if someone is from Yorkshire? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you”.
Elmet, an ancient Celtic kingdom in what is now the West Riding, gives its name to the debut novel of Fiona Mozley. Our narrator Daniel is a teenager struggling with his hatching masculinity. He lives with his tomboy sister Cathy, and his father “Daddy”, as outcasts in a near future semi-dystopia set somewhere that might be Doncaster (insert your own joke). They live outside town in a house Daddy built with his bare hands. Daddy is a brute: a six-foot-plenty illegal boxing champion (presumably Tom Cruise to play him in the film).
It’s fairly standard Booker shortlist fare. There’s a bit of plot — Daddy gets into a scrape with a local gangster and shit goes down — but most of the action is character, and our maxim is show don’t tell. A neighbour looking after Daniel and Cathy considers why it is that whales breach, jumping out of the water to slam back onto its surface. People say they are trying to clean their skin but “it meets at the same point doesn’t it? The need for a physical sensation they can’t get any other way. That sensation becomes a fixation and each time after they feel it the pressure slowly builds until they can feel it again.” She is talking about Daddy’s primal need to knock seven bells out of someone but she could also be talking about their mother, a peripheral figure who flits in and out of the background as she struggles with addiction.
The characters are not clichés, but nor are they especially rounded. Often they are two extremes shoved into one person as if to say, “see, balance”. Daddy for example is violently battering somebody one minute, and then clearing out an idyllic candle-lit Christmas copse for the kids the next. Maybe, he isn’t all bad after all? In a purely character novel that would be big weakness but there is enough otherwise going on here that it doesn’t matter too much.
I remember, from the depths of my childhood, an interview on Inside Out with a local comedian who explained why he thought the North West has produced so many comedians. He credits the grim industrial way of life in many northern cities. Life was tough up north and so “you had to laugh or cry. We all know that folk in Yorkshire took one route, and we took the other”.
It’s a bleak novel. Daddy tries to protect the kids from the grimness of the adult world but he can’t. Daniel ends up a tragic Rickety Cricket character, shadowing the East Coast mainline servicing truckers to make ends meet as he searches for his lost sister, begging a hot meal here and there along the way.
If Daniel is a soft young man struggling to adapt to the world’s demands that he be hard, Cathy has the opposite problem. The last we see of her, in the book’s final major scene, she decides enough is enough, channelling a blazing rage which nods heavily to Carrie.
One or two affectations grate. “I handt eaten owt hot in days” was one particular attempt to capture t’local speech patterns that made me cringe. Wikipedia tells us that Mozley was born in London but grew up in York, so if this is not quite cultural appropriation it’s something like noblesse oblige.
I’m being fussy though. Reviews have concentrated on the book’s approach to “gender issues” but it isn’t one of those books that disguises a sermon as a story and the description shouldn’t put anyone off. At heart it’s a classic tale of teenage angst filtered through a modern lens, with some sexy fireworks at the end. On the whole, I think it works quite well.
7/10
