LITERARY FICTION
TOWARDS MELLBREAK by Marie-Elsa Bragg (Chatto £12.99)
MARIE-ELSA BRAGG, a chaplain at Westminster Abbey, proves she is a literary force worthy of her name (she’s Melvyn’s daughter) with her quiet, elegiac debut.
Set in Cumbria, it’s a bracing antidote to the Romantic view of the Lake District through its depiction of the hardscrabble life of farmers between 1971 and 1994.
There’s Catherine, her son Harold, his wife Esther and their son Stephen, who together work the Cumbrian fells, just about managing to see off the industrialisation of farming before the consequences of a government cover-up threatens to undo their livelihood.
Bragg writes wonderfully well about landscape in particular, but is prone to convoluted similes, describing, for instance, a lake as ‘not yet seen, but felt, like a promise’, which makes no sense.
But in so richly depicting the hermetic bond between the Cumbrian landscape and the people who live there, she makes a subtle political point about the ease with which governments and big business disregard those whose lives are, for the most part, hidden from view.
THE FORENSIC RECORDS SOCIETY by Magnus Mills (Bloomsbury £18.99)
BUS driver turned Bookershortlisted novelist Magnus Mills may be hailed as one of our most idiosyncratic voices, but that’s not to say his deceptively genial, eerily comic novels aren’t often about similar things, namely the power dynamics within groups of men and that very English love for petty rules as a bulwark against the chaos.
This latest centres on a bunch of record fanatics who meet each week down the pub to listen to 7in singles in a strictly controlled environment — except that soon a rebellious splinter group is formed, followed by a second, and the original society is plunged into crisis.
Mills is extremely good on the way obsessiveness is an end in itself for these barely distinguishable chaps, who are drawn to the exacting rituals of listening rather than through any particular engagement with the music itself. It’s a pretty slight novel that lacks the allegorical force of some of Mills’s more ambitious books.
Yet it also contains some classic Mills hallmarks, including the unsettling impression something sinister is going on, if only you could work out what it is.
THE EVENING ROAD by Laird Hunt (Chatto and Windus £14.99)
AMERICAN novelist Laird Hunt’s latest novel asks a question that feels horribly pertinent in these turbulent times: what draws people to watch catastrophic violence inflicted against others?
Inspired by the 1930 Indiana lynchings that gave rise to Billie Holiday’s civil rights classic Strange Fruit, it follows two women on the day the lynchings are to take place.
Ottie Lee, an unhappily married white woman, can’t wait to see them; Calla Destry, a black woman, gets caught up in the mob as she tries to find the white father of her unborn child.
Hunt stealthily builds up the strange atmospheric pressure surrounding the lynchings (which are never depicted): as Ottie travels to the spectacle with her husband and lover, the mood is delirious, almost carnivalesque.
Laird has been criticised for replacing the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ in this novel with ‘cornsilk’ and ‘cornflower’, but I think this adds to the nightmarish luminosity of this dream-like horror story, forcing the reader to see an ugly old truth anew.