Debutant novelist Fiona Mozley’s Elmet was one of the
biggest surprises of 2017 Booker Prize as it made into the shortlist. Fiona, a
29 year old graduate student, who was working on her PhD in medieval studies at
York University, says the inception of the novel began during an early morning
train journey from York to London. The beautiful and old landscape of Yorkshire
– Fiona’s homeland – was once part of the ancient, small & independent Celtic kingdom of Elmet. While the genesis of the novel’s plot was set out in
the train ride, it took another three years for her to entirely finish and
publish the book. Despite its ancient title, the novel is set in the modern
rural England, which revolves around themes as old as violence, family life, fratricide,
land ownership, and vengeance. Armed with the distinct British social realist
sensibility, Elmet doubles up as a coming-of-age tale that reverses gender
expectations. It’s also a microcosm of our tumultuous post-industrial society which empathetically peeks into the lives of disenfranchised people. Fiona
Mozley’s plot construction does have its share of flaws and doesn’t seem
well-rounded at times. Yet her expressive, thoroughly introspective writing plus
her ability to evoke the foreboding atmospheric setting lends an enlivening
reading experience.
The story is narrated by an observant 14 year old teen Daniel.
He has started a fresh chapter in his life with strong-minded 16 year old
sister Cathy and hulking Daddy, a giant of a man who made his way in life
through illegal bare-knuckle fighting. The daddy named John is reputed to be
the formidable fighter in the land. The trio has relocated to the wild woods of
West Yorkshire, setting out to construct their own red-brick house near a copse, situated
in a picturesque hillock. Daddy goes out for doing odd jobs and rarely ventures to the
town. Danny and Cathy gleefully move through the wide expanse, hunting their own
food, drinking cider and also smoking roll-ups. Daddy John is an interesting
figure, a man who finds his life’s purpose in sporadic moments of violence,
even though his gruffness and rage is never directed towards Danny and Cathy. The
threat of medieval-kind of violence comes to the fore when a domineering
landlord named Mr. Price comes poking around. Daddy had once worked as a fixer
and prizefighter for Mr. Price, before becoming a renegade. He vows to rally
Price’s exploited renters/workers against him to improve their livelihood. Of
course, the daddy’s radicalism culminates with explosive bursts of ghastly violence.
Fiona Mozley takes pains to describe the striking imagery of
the bucolic setting, skillfully using her lilting poetic prose. She offers a tableau
of agrarian society, riddled with dirt bikers and laborers’ letting off steam
through betting on illicit fights or horse racing. Furthermore, she is adept at
building tense, dreadful atmosphere, gradually setting the stage for a powerful
finale. There’s subtle tenderness in Mozley’s writing about the outcast
family’s affinity towards each other, making the readers to implore for their safety. While Danny
is the omniscient narrator, Cathy emerges as the novel’s unconventional and
memorable hero. The powerlessness and fatal masculinity of Daddy is
consistently explored in a way that doesn’t give him a favorable position
against the feudal, bloodthirsty landowners. On the other hand, Mozley’s
treatment of Cathy is intriguing and brilliantly transgressive. The emergence
of her heroic, altruistic nature towards the end was both heartbreaking and
strangely cathartic. The small faults and pacing problems in the narrative
could mostly be overlooked because it’s a laudable first novel in many ways.
Elmet is a rich, neo-Gothic tale of family life, class
conflicts, ownership and the perpetual power struggles. This bewitching,
plot-driven novel well deserves its place in the last year’s Booker Prize
short-list.
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