Red Meat
Readers escape and go someplace else, and some of them, when they return, bring things back and use them to become writers. Apparently, judging from their fictions, young British readers have been going to America. In different ways, their novels are all done up American style, as in supersized with cheese, or in a leather jacket, head tilted, with a thumb hooked through the belt loop of the jeans. The Borrowed Hills, a debut from Scott Preston, who comes from the English Lake District, is marketed both as a hard look at the neglected moors and mountains of the English northwest, and as a reimagined American Western, with a story and sensibility “for fans of Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy.” It makes an authentic assertion with its narration in Cumbrian dialect, the “hardscrabble voice of a forgotten England,” but the “thrilling adventure,” which gets started with some sheep-rustling and has many borrowings from the American frontier, would seem to bely the tribute to home.
Our rustic narrator is Steve Elliman, a shepherd like his father and many fathers before them. They rent their farm, Montgarth, in the fictional Curdale Valley, a “dent six miles wide with its shoulders covered in scree,” with a two-pub village called Bewrith nearby, the Irish Sea a little further, and the more prosperous English South “never far enough away.” Looking back and squinting from middle age over twenty years later, Steve tells a story that begins with History, the UK’s outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001. The Ellimans’ flock of herdwicks looks sturdy, but a vet dressed as a “white rubber spaceman” finds lesions on their gums, and they must be culled. There is to be killing on a much larger scale on the neighboring farm Caldhithe, but its owner, William Herne (“William bloody Herne”), is armed and willing to resist. A vivid conflagration of Herne’s sheep is followed by some strained words with the police, and Steve understandably wants to get away, not for the first time, which means more lorry driving all over the country, everywhere but Cumbria. But after three years of hauling, he finds that a truck-stop prostitute, Yelena, reminds him at least nominally of Helen, William’s intriguing wife; he talks to her about those old hills, trees, and rocks; finally, his father’s decease calls him back. He starts working for William and banters with Helen who it turns out was his father’s nurse. Drawn back to the hills and fixed up with room and board, a nice change from life on the motorways, he gets too comfortable. When William works up a scheme with an odious criminal named Colin Tilney, alias “Mincemeat,” to pilfer some lovely heirloom Jacob sheep from a fancy farm in Herefordshire, we, and on some level Steve, already know that catastrophe and violence are ahead.
For readers who like the idea of “real people,” The Borrowed Hills, a colorful chronicle of just that sort, will be a treat. There’s so much to take in, starting with their rural patter: “nowt” and “owt,” “bowk up,” “maungy,” “anyroad,” “cairn.” They live among rolling hills, rock faces sculpted by the wind, “gorge, beck, fall, cliff, bog, dale, and weathered white boulder.” That word, “hardscrabble,” may be American, but it was forged for all people like Steve. For him, living is “mucking out” and getting by, accustomed from childhood to blood, mud, and sheep shit. Farmers have seen death so many times that they can greet any violence as just “Another thing to deal with.” Steve, just like his dad, is very terse. Likes to drop the subjects from his sentences. Says “y’know,” and “I’d only time to swerve into a patch of brambles.” Sometimes he poetically exaggerates, as in “They say you have six dreams a night and I saw three times as many uses for a bullet,” and he likes a snarky detail, like Colin’s lady friends’ leggings, “fishnets that couldn’t catch owt.” Just like his dad, and every single other character, he’s cynical: hundreds of curt fragments stick together and accumulate weight. Steve proves himself tough, and William’s son Danny says, “Remind me to never piss you off.” Or he worries a drunk farmer won’t get home safe, and the answer is “One way to find out.”
Our reprieve from this heaviness, this feeling of trudging in the mire, is the action scenes, quick footed and keenly outlined. Preston has a lot of herding and culling and lorry driving to get through, so the rustling and fighting don’t start until over a hundred pages in, but once they do, the pace is up. Steve has some unwelcome new roommates who roister away, smoking, drinking, and snorting. A scene of bare-knuckle boxing gets Preston off his heels, and he finds a new momentum in some livelier rhythms: “Then smacked him back, smacking mad, popped and thumped, whacking ripples in his belly, cracking quick his outgrown hip, one, two, one, two, the oysters in his back, right and left and soft and bone.” Steve has to live in a van, and there’s muttering at the pub, another criminal scheme, a drug overdose, and the final cliff-edge set pieces, with their feints, threats and reversals, where we do go properly into Western mode, though, in a wry turn, a shoddy British rifle stalls at a critical moment.
The aftermath is long, and it allows the novel to settle back into the squinty-eyed, windswept pastoral. A rather ginned up ending with some ritual bloodletting does not save us from the vague sense that what Preston has been working toward is a book of folk wisdom. It may be Cumbrian wisdom, but it doesn’t sound all that different from the wisdom of the rural poor in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, say, or, as advertised, that of a grizzled gunman telling a young buck how it really is. (Hints of Proulx’ “If you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it,” maybe, but not McCarthy. Preston’s models are more likely the cruel new westerns by S. Craig Zahler, and the straight-shooting originals of Louis L’Amour). Steve has dealt, in grumpy epigrams, with isolation (“Miles of nowt make thick walls”), money (“only as good as what it buys you”), and career choices (“All you’ve got in life is what you can look at. Best make sure it’s not a pavement full of dog shit or the wrong side of a supermarket checkout.”) Once they’ve made it through the valley of the shadow of death, wary Steve watches how William copes as a survivor: “No man can hate himself and keep living. He either learns to love the parts he hates or cuts them out and hopes what’s left is strong enough.”
The wisdom and weary wit are Steve’s (and one supposes Preston’s) patrimony, wrapped up in the warm, woolly dialect. Steve must inherit something, even if the Ellimans never owned their land, though, as the title reminds us, ownership is temporary anyway, a torch to be passed when the runner passes on. Again, the novel is a curious thing: a tribute to the author’s native land, charming as all sincere tributes are, but using a foreign genre to construct the plot. Preston, perhaps by accident, has found what is shared between the two settings, the lines that could play on Montgarth or in Montana territory. But this won’t be enough that it’ll make sense for every reader: this one was waiting for the gestalt moment where it all fits together. Returning to the larger transatlantic theme, there is an unsettling hint of the algorithm, the image of a poorly stitched Frankenstein, in the marketing of fiction, especially when the author is British but with American tastes and connections. Autofiction meets gothic! Campus novel meets horror story, with family drama! Northwest England but with cowboys! If the writer has made it work, it’s a relief to read, and one has discovered a contemporary talent, that of the synthesist. If not, we’re left with gimmickry.
What follows is our search for something more interesting than the main thing on offer. To a restless explorer, a loose detail which the author got down quickly on the page may be more enticing than he intended. Until the climactic shootouts, the most obvious imports from the Old West are the toughs flanking Colin, the “two grunters.” George, “the biggest fella I’ve ever met,” is such a crook that his back is crooked, and Bog, missing several teeth, says little, and sounds like his tongue is swollen. When you bring in stock characters, cardboard cutouts from another set, they start to look a little more interesting in new surroundings, or it may just be that one is tired of Steve’s rather monotonous company, his homely Cumbrian pensées. (When you look at them again you realize they are just self-help with less optimism, Oprah Winfrey with nowt to sell you.) Anyway, one wonders what Bog has to say about all the goings on, the bitter drinking and brawling, the treacherous twists. Unlike George, Bog (with a name like Bog) is definitely, defiantly English. His accent makes Steve think he might be from “a part of England where they made a dog mayor and not for a laugh”—now that’s a county I’d like to read about. Who are Bog’s people? What is Bog’s philosophy, the way of Bog, and what are Bog’s dreams? Whither Bog, and what will he find there?
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in The Adroit Journal, Cleveland Review of Books, The Oxonian Review, and Chicago Review of Books. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.
