A GOTHIC REVIVAL
Man Booker nominee channels myth, fairy tale and the western
When Fiona Mozley thinks back to the moment when she learned she had been longlisted for the Man Booker prize, she immediately remembers the reaction of her dog.
They had been enjoying a summer walk near her Yorkshire home when she decided to check for phone messages. That’s when she learned she had received an initial nod from Booker judges for her debut novel, a compelling piece of contemporary gothic called Elmet.
“I’d had a few missed calls from my editor in London,” she says. “So we stopped at a cafe and I called her back. That’s when I learned the news. And the dog started barking because he could tell from the tone of my voice that something exciting was happening. He was leaping all over the place.”
It seems characteristic of Mozley, a writer with an eye for detail, that she should now take a moment to talk about her four-footed companion.
“He’s a small lurcher,” she says cheerfully. “Bits of greyhound, whippet and terrier — an allaround mix. It was the terrier in him that got excited.”
The British media also got excited. Within days, Mozley found herself besieged with requests for interviews. At 29, she was the second-youngest author ever to be nominated for Britain’s most prestigious literary prize. (The youngest being Eleanor Catton at 28, who won in 2013 for The Luminaries.)
“I know it’s almost a cliché to say this, but it was a total surprise,” she says from her home in the cathedral city of York. “I hadn’t even been aware that my publishers had put the book forward.”
She found herself trying to make a connection between a novel that had begun as a few notes tapped onto her phone during a train journey and the eruption of newspaper headlines proclaiming that she had been “catapulted from anonymity to literary stardom.”
But she was determined to maintain her emotional equilibrium. Back in August she told one journalist that — regardless of the final Booker vote — she already felt she had won. “I’ll always be in the 2017 Booker dozen, no matter what happens — pretty cool!” she said.
Mozley later made it onto the Booker short list and then lost, honourably, to George Saunders for Lincoln in the Bardo. But by this time, her gripping literary debut was making its own waves, with The Economist hailing it as “a quiet literary explosion of a book.”
But what kind of book? Elmet doesn’t fit easily into any niche.
It’s set in our own times — but not quite — and focuses on a tightly knit family of three driven by a back-to-nature impulse.
The novel’s opening sentence stayed with Mozley from the moment it started taking shape in her mind: “Daddy and Cathy and I lived in a small house that Daddy built with materials from the land hereabout.” Daddy is John, a grizzled mountain of a man, who has made his living as an itinerant boxer and an enforcer for hire but has now retreated from his wider world to a rural part of Yorkshire’s West Riding where he builds a simple home for his two children — daughter Cathy and son Daniel — and seeks to live off the land. But he is essentially a squatter: The property is not his, and John and the actual owner have a difficult history. The growing tensions have catastrophic consequences.
Is Elmet a contemporary fairy tale? Some British critics think so. Or is it rooted in the ancient mythology of Yorkshire when it was a Celtic kingdom known as Elmet? Or does this highly original novel really have the trappings of an oldfashioned western?
“I think it’s all those things,” Mozley says. “I was certainly thinking of westerns. The preoccupation with land and ownership and the relationship between individuals and the natural world is something influenced by westerns.”
But Mozley, currently proceeding toward a doctorate in medieval history at York University, is also immersed in the Yorkshire culture in which she grew up.
“The book has been described as northern gothic, which isn’t a label I’d thought about at all before somebody used it, but I think it sort of fits as well — the idea that things that have been buried are beginning to emerge.”
In her own mind, the novel has a hybrid sensibility, steeped in the heritage of Yorkshire but influenced by current political and social issues.
Her first-person narrative has the texture of a memory piece: Daniel also serves as the prism for the emergence of a rich gallery of characters beginning with his own family members.
Mozley is clear on what she wants readers to take away from Elmet.
“I want them to have an emotional reaction,” she says. She gets impatient with attempts in today’s literary world to force a distinction between emotional and intellectual responses to a piece of writing.
“I’m interested in the way that literature can open up intellectual avenues through emotional content,” she says. “So I want people to have a physical reaction to this book.”