21 March/22 March 2020 ★ FT Weekend 11Books
E
vie Wyld has a self-admitted
fascination with sharks. Her
2015 graphic memoirEvery-
thing Is Teeth illustrated by(
J o e S u m n e r ) v i v i d l y
described how terror of the creatures,
instilled in infancy and compounded
during holidays at her Australian
grandparents’ coastal farm n Newi
South Wales, continuously invaded her
imagination, evenas an adult living far
from the sea.
InThe Bass Rock, Wyld’s new book and
third novel, a subtly menacing scene
early on underlines its main theme: that
of predator and prey.
It is the late 1940s. A shark has
washed up on a beach near North Ber-
wick in Scotland. Ruth Hamilton, trans-
planted from London to live at the local
“big house” with her new husband and
young stepsons, accompanies the
excited boys to bear witness. The dead
animal is “an enormous black crescent,
gunmetal against the sand”, its bulky
grandeur systematically dismantled by
the seagulls that normally gather on the
nearby looming expanse of the Bass
Rock like “white ghosts”. To Ruth, an
outsider, it is sickening and compelling.
The image of a defenceless body, often
that of a woman who has been mur-
dered, and the intimately horrible post-
humous desecrations performed on it,
recurs throughout the novel. It is set
across three different time periods, allcentred on the house near the shore
overlooking the Bass Rock, and in the
vastness of the dark woods nearby.
Wolves roamed here once; now the fear
of wolf-like humans sticks to the sub-
conscious like burrs.
In the present day, Viviane, at a loss
following the recent death of her father,
is clearing the house, last inhabited by
his late stepmother, to ready it for sale.
Nearing 40, she is troubled by drink,
uncertainty and the supposed perfec-
tion of her younger married sister. Most
insistent, a gruesome childhood discov-
ery of the remains of a dead woman
squashed into a suitcase on the nearby
beach bothers her. The memory flickers
at the edges of her imagination, rather
like the figure of a girl she sometimes
catches at the corner of her eye at cer-
tain moments in the house.
This girl was also at the periphery of
Ruth’s vision, years before, in the imme-
diate postwar period. A whirlwind mar-
riage to an older widower has quickly
soured. Ruth is installed as little more
than a housekeeper while Peter, her
emotionally manipulative husband,
conducts an affair in Edinburgh. The
boys, of whom she is fond, endure their
own silent misery at a sadistic boarding
school. Ruth, like Viviane after her, has
spent some time in an institution. For
Ruth, this followed what was deemed to
be an “inappropriate” excess of grief for
her brother, killed in the war. As the
novel, which is in myriad ways a study of
coercive control, advances, Peter threat-
ens Ruth with committal to an asylum
in order to conceal his affair.
Running alongside Ruth’s and Vivi-
ane’s narratives is a much older one,
that of Joseph, avillage boy from the
1700s. He and his widowed father res-away of “difficult” children and women.
There is marital rape, a sinister ritual
“game” of hide-and-seek between
adults at a picnic, and a paedophile ring,
exposed years later to devastating and
lasting effect.
Sarah’s sections of the novel are less
successful, despite giving a rich frame-
work to subsequent generations of
women performing acts of righteous
vengeance against oppressors. Ruth’s
cook Betty brutally avenges the collu-
sion of church and state that lobot-
omised her vulnerable sister; Viviane is
rescued by oddball, damaged Maggie as
a stranger lurks near her deserted car;
later, the sweetly offbeat man with
whom she halfheartedly begins a rela-
tionship turns creepily sinister, as does
her sister’s estranged husband.
While at times clumsily overwhelm-
ing in its relentless summoning of
the living and the dead, Wyld’s inten-
tions are clear; and her prose shines,
even as it devours.The Bass Rock
by Evie Wyld
Jonathan Cape £16.99
368 pagesA rock and a hard place
Three women, one house: Evie Wyld’s new novel fearlessly explores themes of
male violence and skewed power across the generations. ByCatherine Taylor
A fireside read,
with splinters
Christian House an icy intertwining of love, legendon
and gritty reality in the wilds of 19th-century NorwayW
hen Norwegian
Wood became a
surprise bestseller
in 2015, Lars Myt-
ting’s paean to the
Nordic etiquette for stacking and
burning logs showed that the
regional can be universal. InThe
Bell in the Lake, the second of his
novels to be translated into Eng-
lish and the first in a planned tril-
ogy, Mytting brings that same
border-crossing affinity to the
vagaries of love and duty in the
Norwegian wilds.
The book opens with a medieval
back-story: the legend of con-
joined twins Gunhild and Halfrid
Hekne, tapestry weavers from
Butangen, a cluster of farmsteads
in central Norway. The sisters
walk “in a waltz-like rhythm, as if
carrying a brimful water-pail
between them” and are adored for
their intricate “hekneweaves”.
When they die young, sitting at the
loom, their heartbroken father
memorialises them by using the
family silver to cast a pair of bells
for the village’s stave church.
Those bells are still ringing in
1880 as Astrid Hekne, the twins’
distant descendant, dreams of
expanding her youthful horizons.
Butangen sits on the edge of Lake
Losnes in the Gudbrandsdalen val-
ley and is “20 years behind its
neighbouring villages, which were
30 years behind Norway’s towns
and cities, which were 50 years
behind the rest of Europe”.
Astrid sees an opportunity for
progress in Kai Schweigaard, the
sinewy new pastor, a man of action
and modern ideas. Kai has a “fizz”
to him, Astrid finds, like that “in a
bottle of Yuletide brew”. However,
his 700-year-old stave church — a
puzzle of poles and tar — is shaped
by Christian, pagan and Viking
elements, much like its congrega-
tion. In winter, the font ices over
and the vast wooden structure
creaks like a ship in a storm. There
is a chilling account of an intermi-
nable service: by the closing
hymn, one elderly parishioner is
dead, her cheek frozen to the wall.
Schweigaard plans to sell the
church and build a new one. His
buyer is the Dresden Academy of
Art, which aims to dismantle the
building and reconstruct it in Sax-
ony. When Gerhard Schönauer,
the academy’s envoy, arrives to
survey the church and its famous
bells,he offers Astrid an altogether
different future. A love triangle,
more of repressed desire than
action, develops like a chamber
piece played on an epic icy stage.
Creating characters marginal-
ised within their own worlds is
Mytting’s strength. Astrid is
caught between a love for themystical beliefs of her ancestors
and a longing to see a new world;
Kai is a man of God who desires the
touch of a woman; and Gerhard is
a talent manipulated by his
employers.
A novel infused with folklore
could seem twee to a contempo-
rary reader but, wisely, Mytting
salts the narrative with the grit of
valley life. Aided by Deborah
Dawkins’ fluid translation, it reads
like a gruelling piece of oral his-
tory, full of fabulous events but
also everyday tragedies. The tone
is set by a farmer who puts his
recently deceased wife in the out-
house, the body’s scent acting as a
lure for foxes.
There were tight cultural ties
between Germany and Norway in
the 19th century — German moun-
taineers traversed Norway’s land-
scape while academics linked tales
of Thor and Odin to Wagnerian
Valkyries. Mytting details the cul-
tural appropriation by Germany,
along with Norway’s culpability at
a time when its people wereThe Bell in the Lake
by Lars Mytting
translated by Deborah Dawkins
MacLehose Press £16.99, 400 pagesB
ox Hill in Surrey lies
about 30km south-
west of London, and
offers spectacular
views across the North
Downs.Known for being the set-
ting ofthe picnicin Jane Austen’s
Emma, the viewpoint was, accord-
ing to Colin Smith — whose curi-
ous sexual awakening forms the
heart of Adam Mars-Jones’s
fourth novel — a popular Sunday
afternoon hang-out for 1970s
leather-clad bikers.
It’s on Box Hill, on his 18th
birthday, that Colin meets Ray
Jones. “He was tasty,” says Colin,
referring to Ray’s handsomeness
— but “tasty” is also a slang term
for somebody who’s good at fight-
ing, which is apt for Ray, who
exudes an air of menace. Colin
moves in with the older man the
next day and they begin a sado-
masochistic love affair that lasts
six years.
The teenager’s parents might
have been expected to object, but
Colin — who is narrating these
experiences from the vantage
point of middle age — says they
considered Ray “a good influ-
ence”. Colin’s “little mum” and“little dad” represent a ygoneb
world, a kind of eternal 1950s,
sheltered from the liberations of
subsequent decades.
Colin and Ray’s relationship is
defined by rules and sexual ten-
sion. Ray cuts Colin’s hair, makes
him sleep on the floor and forces
him to stay out of the house dur-
ing the day. “He didn’t need to give
a reason,” says Colin, who submits
to Ray without complaint. “That
was just the way it was.”
Ray is at once mysterious —
Colin never finds out what he
does for a living or his age —and
ordinary (“a stickler for speed
limits”). Their world is a combi-
nation offantasy and thehum-
drum and, in contrast with their
surreal sex life, theirordinariness
(encapsulated in their surnames,
Smith and Jones)feelsradical.
I found Colin’s voice affected,
particularly in its repetitions:
“Not just experience but experi-
ence in the form that intoxicates.
Not just experience but practice.”
Colin talks about “the naffness” ofhis leather jacket and says “naff
was a word then in its prime”. Yet
it’sa good word to describe Colin
when he says things such as:
“Ray’s bike was as classic as he
was — they were versions of the
same superlative, he in confi-
dence and leather, the Norton in
power and chrome.”
The period observations would
be better suited to a memoir: “In
1975 there were still a few people
called Marjorie.” There could be a
broader socialcommentary here
as 1975, the year Colin met Ray,
was when Britons voted over-
whelminglyto stay in the Euro-
pean Economic Community.
Later, Colin mentions Aids — a
subject Mars-Jones explored in
his short-story collectionMono-
polies of Loss 1992) — and the(
melancholic tone of these pas-
sages indicates thatColin’s story
might be a metaphor for the
losses gay men would endure.
Making such claims, however, I
can hear myself trying to find
meanings inBox Hill hat aren’tt
necessarily there. It’s a clever and
subtle novel but one that left me
cold. Last year, Mars-Jones pub-
lishedSecond Sight, a collection of
his film criticism, which, like this
novel, spanned around three dec-
ades, and there is a stark cine-
matic quality toBox Hill. If the
book were transferred to the
screen, its strange atmosphere
might be arresting, but on the
page the material falls flat.Hell for leather
A gay S&M relationship
is at the core of this clevernovel — but opportunities
are missed, saysMax LiuBox Hill
by Adam
Mars-Jones
Fitzcarraldo
Editions £9.99
128 pagesemigrating to America to escape
poverty. “The instant a society
ceases to produce surplus to its
basic needs, its respect for its cul-
tural history starts to suffer,”
observes a German burgomaster.
Mytting’s account of the dis-
mantling of the old church is a bra-
vura piece of writing, invoking the
strange process of creating an
absence. And it is based on a real
event: in 1842, the Norwegian
painter Johan Christian Dahl bro-
kered a deal with King Frederick
William IV of Prussia to transport
a stave church to Silesia.
Much like Marcel Pagnol did in
his Provençal novels, Mytting
shows how landscape and climate
can define a character. He also
stresses the currency of myths in a
rural environment, how they pro-
vide a buffer to the elements. He
delivers village wisdom — “You
knew something was good, when
the complaints stopped” — and
jagged realism. It is a fireside read
with splinters.(2009) andAll the Birds, Singing 2013)(
have been largely set in Australia. While
she moves into more ambitious terri-
tory with the different time sequences
ofThe Bass Rock, the pull of that country
remains. Wyld has said the novel was
inspired by an online “death map”of the
locations of murders of women, many
unidentified, in Australia.
Dealing with the consequences of
abuse, estrangement and male violence,
Wyld is unhesitatingly brave in her writ-
ing, especially on fear, disgust and
skewed power. She has an instinctive
understanding of the interchangeability
between humans and nature that can
border, thrillingly, on animism, as in the
work of her contemporaries Sarah Hall
and Sarah Moss.
Domestic violence, or the threat of it,
floods the pages ofThe Bass Rock. It is
best realised in Ruth’s sections — Wyld’s
delineation of the era is cut-glass per-
fect: its clipped emotions, inherent sex-
ism, automatic silencing of and puttingW
hen the age of 93
approaches, it
seems prudent to
have a headstone
ready. For Jan
Morris, the stone is another
blank page: she has already
inscribed the epitaph, and its
morbid publication “awaits the
day under the stairs”.
Morris intends the headstone to
sit on an islet in the river Dwyfor
near her home, “smilingly to
crack and crumble into nothing”.
And so the paradox ofThinking
Again: a mind organising for
death, and a writer putting an ele-
gant shoulder to it. Morris writes,
indomitably, every day, even
when there is only food and tele-
vision to report, but always with a
monumental presence — The End
— close by. As immovable as the
view of Mount Snowdon from her
kitchen window, death inspires
philosophically vivid inquiry, set
alongside events that are either
borrowed (for example from
America, where Trump is sensa-
tionally elected) or banal, such as
a summery drive to a favourite
pub that has unexpectedly run
dry of Guinness.For a writer whose subjects
once ranged grandly from Hillary
and Norgay’s ascent of Everest to
the postwar canals of Venice, this
inevitably leads to moments of
reproach and self-censure — some
entries are cut altogether. Inter-
estingly, Morris also admits she
has “developed an unhealthy
addiction to reading my own
books”, enjoying the experience
of “encountering them again,
like old acquaintances”. Other
records for distant experiences
seem to have vanished, leading to
anxious doubts over whether it is
the memory or the archive that is
at fault.
Bound together with pages
from Morris’s diary over 2018-19,
Thinking Again s neverthelessi
grounded by sweetly undramatic,
comic and precise pleasures:
breadsticks eaten by the fire with
tea, a daily 1,000-pace walk, and
the faint innocence of Welsh rural
life, its seaside tableaux providing
a melancholy “perfection”, to
which nothing more can beful old-fashioned sanity of her
authorial persona, we get
glimpses of other frailties: she
finds it “harder every year to get
up in the morning”, suffers
“satanic” bursts of impatience
with the dementia that afflicts her
partner Elizabeth, and the house
itself she reports as “night-
marishly cluttered, run down,
undusted”.
All the while the geopolitical
world is a “hot, stinking tide of
events”.(Bring back a prime min-
ister from her lifetime, someone
of the calibre of Winston Church-
ill, she laments post-Brexit refer-
endum, reminding us of her
improbable longevity.)
And yet, this is a book of great
solace, taken not least from the
“home of her heart”, Trefan
Morys, the 18th-century farm
estate on the Llyn Peninsula
where she lives, and which she
reveals will become a literary
retreat after she’s gone. Morris’s
love for Wales provides perhaps
the surest, most personal comfort,
in face of a universal difficulty, an
awareness that days both create
and oxidise a life, whether under
Venetian skies or Welsh ones.
As her countryman Waldo Wil-
liams wrote: “What is staying
alive? To possess/A great hall
inside of a cell.” InThinking
Again, we get the “great hall”, and
we can only lament it might be
the last place that Morris puts
to paper.The final frontier
Jan Morris explores the
epic and everyday in herlatest volume of diaries.
By N atalie WhittleThinking
Again
by Jan Morris
Faber £16.99
224 pagesWolves roamed here once;
now the fear of wolf-like
humans sticks to thesubconscious like burrs
added. This is a book full of
improbable but touching fric-
tions: mortality and marmalade
are considered on the same page,
and memories of cold war Mos-
cow elide with respectful appreci-
ations of Tiger Woods.
Many of the titular reflections
prove to be short glimpses with
abrupt endings, a device that
threatens to irritate but ulti-
mately maintains a spry clip to
the writing. Indeed, as a self-de-
scribed “ageinglittérateur”, Mor-
ris surely has few who could ride
so adroitly in the same carriage.
It is the hardship of unresolved
affairs that provides the greatestinterest, often surfacedby an
unconscious mind seemingly
demanding final account for
imbalances. Could she have been
more generous with praise for her
son, she asks herself one sleepless
night. Was it a cruelty not to
respond to a letter writer?
There is a brief allusion to a
“sexually complex” life (her
byline was James Morris when the
Everest report was published),
though the door here is more
firmly closed. And past the cheer-Marmalade and
mortality linger on the
same page in this workof touching frictions
cue a young woman, Sarah, who has
been captured from the forest, gang-
raped and condemned as a witch by a
group of their neighbours. Offering pro-
tection to Sarah, whom the local men
insist has “bewitched” them and should
be punished, means the family must
take immediate flight. This part is told
as Joseph’s account, his initial compas-
sion for Sarah turning into a fatally pos-
sessive desire.
Wyld’s previous, award-winning nov-
elsAfter the Fire, a Still Small VoiceMARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 19/3/2020- 17:48 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD11, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 11, 1