About the Book
Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. When they were younger, Daniel and Cathy had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they were even less like them now. Sometimes Daddy disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasn’t true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew.
Format: ebook (320 pages) Publisher: John Murray
Publication date: 27th July 2017 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction
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My Review
Elmet is the story of two children – Daniel and Cathy – who live with their father in a house in a forest, largely apart from the rest of society. It’s a strange, rather spartan life in which their father seeks to keep them separate from the world but also to protect them from some undisclosed danger. As fourteen-year-old Daniel, the book’s narrator, says, ‘Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world.’ Despite their very basic lifestyle and lack of creature comforts, the two children have a strong bond with their father. ‘Cathy and I did not mind taking orders from Daddy. Sometimes we were more like an army than a family and he was not the type of leader to make you do anything for nothing.’
An interesting aspect of the children’s upbringing is the way it has blurred, even removed, gender distinctions. As Daniel observes, ‘You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy… It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. I did not think of Cathy as a girl nor a woman, I thought of her as Cathy. I did not think of Daddy as a man, though I knew that he was. I thought about him, likewise, as Daddy.’
Whilst an intense and, at times, disturbing read, I liked the way the author introduced themes such as concern for the environment. In contrast to the local landowner, who regards the land merely as a source of profit, the children’s father carefully tends the forest and teaches his children the skills to do the same. ‘In order to let new growth fight through, overhanging branches, crumbled bark and fallen trees must be cleared. Weeds in the undergrowth must be managed. The right shoots must be let through and the wrong ones discouraged.’ Much like indigenous people in other parts of the world, the children’s father cannot understand the concept of ownership of land. “It’s idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper.”
When resistance grows to the landowners who wield power over the local community, the stakes are raised and events take a dark turn. As one of the leaders of the resistance, the children’s father becomes a target for retaliation of the most brutal kind and the children’s ability to respond to ‘the dark things in the world’ for which their father has prepared them is finally put to the test.
I received an advance review copy courtesy of John Murray via NetGalley.
In three words: Dark, chilling, unsettling
Try something similar: The Wanderers by Tim Pears
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About the Author
Fiona Mozley grew up in York and lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Elmet, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Polari Prize. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dublin Literary Award and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2018 Fiona Mozley was shortlisted for the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. (Photo/bio credit: Publisher author page)
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