The Times - UK (2022-06-11)

(Antfer) #1
the times | Saturday June 11 2022 saturday review 19

T


o call a novel mature — as an
estate agent might describe a
scrupulously tended garden —
isn’t the purest of compliments.
It suggests it might be a teensy
bit boring, lacking in the oomph, pep and
vim that helps to keep the reader’s heart
thrumming as the pages turn.
Not that anyone could lay that accusa-
tion against the previous books by Benja-
min Wood, a British novelist who deserves
more attention than he has had. His debut,
The Bellwether Revivals (2012), was a Secret
History-ish tale of privilege and genius;
The Ecliptic (2015) a bonkers thriller about
art; and A Station on the Path to Somewhere
Better (2018) a slow-burner that exploded
into violence. Wood blends storytelling
punch with literary sensibility, and it’s true
that his new novel — yes, his most mature
yet — does pull those punches, but there
are delicious compensations.
We’re in the bucolic Surrey countryside
in the 1950s, at Leventree, a farm owned by
architect Arthur Mayhood and his wife,
Florence. Arthur struggles to manage the
farm, partly because he’s more intellectual
than practical, but also because he lost an
arm in the war; to help, he takes on Hollis,
a drifter whose character is deftly estab-
lished through appetising gaps. “I’ve got a
brother down in Devon, but he hates my

The kids from


the borstal are


coming to stay


Benjamin Wood shows his skill with


this brooding tale of rural unease


set in the 1950s, says John Self


The Young
Accomplice
by Benjamin Wood

Viking, 368pp; £16.99

guts.” “Oh, I’m sorry.” “Don’t be. I deserve
it.” Arthur is ambitious; he wants to
“change something about the way things
are”; his vision is of “a little Taliesin here in
Ockham” — a reference to Frank Lloyd
Wright’s architectural school and agricul-
tural estate in rural Wisconsin. Arthur

runs a contest to find two young borstal in-
mates who can join him and Florence, get
“a sense of purpose” and climb free of their
wrong beginnings.
The winners are Joyce and Charlie Savi-
gear, who are siblings but very different:
Joyce is “ungainly” at a shade over 6ft;

Charlie is small (Joyce calls him “mouse”).
He reads Ruskin; she listens to Benny
Goodman and drains the Mayhoods’
drinks cupboard. Charlie is ready to move
on from his past; Joyce, not so much.
Wood, who excels at creating these
tense enclosed environments, gives the
Mayhoods and the Savigears the complex-
ity of real people by understanding that
character is illuminated in relation to
others. So we see Hollis’s suspicion of
Charlie and Joyce, and Arthur’s depend-
ence on Florence’s practicality. We
see Charlie and Joyce’s love for one
another: his persistent defence of her
sins (“One day, they’d be buried next to
one another in the cemetery, and his epi-
taph would read: Joyce didn’t mean it”) and
her fear that she is holding him back: “He
belonged... in the company of better
people, in the rooms where opportunities
were made.”
The reader gets a turn in everyone’s
head, and it’s all beautifully done (only
Charlie’s quasi-erotic interest in the

mother figure Florence doesn’t ring true),
but it’s too internal, so we grasp gratefully
at the occasional moment of activity, such
as the sinister fat man who keeps turning
up at the farm, a signal that Joyce’s past is
about to come barrelling back at her. Even
then Wood keeps it subdued: of two
potentially breath-catching moments in
the book, one is dispatched in short order,
the other is off the page altogether.
That makes this a frustrating book at
times. Yet, as the story settles after its ex-
quisite ending (the last line is one of the
best I’ve read in years), these decisions
seem apt after all for a novel built on ab-
sence. It’s only by sustaining his characters
so well that Wood can make us miss them
when they’re gone, and so The Young Ac-
complice shows the difference between a
book that slides down the surface of things,
and one that digs it claws into you and
sticks there.

best of british Benjamin Wood blends storytelling punch with literary sensibility

GARY DOAK/ALAMY

It has an exquisite


ending — the last


line is one of the best


I’ve read in years


only bad clothing”, “It’s the real-deal wil-
derness — the kind of place that really
moulds you”), can save her. And (truly
sleazy) Stu is turning his attentions to Erin,
another teenage employee, much to the
chagrin of Polly, the third teenager working
there, who was his target the previous year.
The mundane tragedy at work here is that
while the teenagers want adulthood, the
adults are desperately fetishising youth.
Miles from any sort of civilisation, the
scene is set for a spiral into disaster —

which Mira relates, from the perspective of
some years’ distance, with a deftly juggled
mix of mercilessly sharp character judg-
ment and gentle compassion for each
person’s failings. But mainly Rukeyser lets
Mira’s solipsistic wranglings with her
sexual desires take centre stage — this is
not a novel for anyone who demands lots
of plot, but definitely one for readers who
enjoy the current crop of distinctly twisted
coming of age tales from female Gen Zers
and the sort of dive into dysfunction
championed by Ottessa Moshfegh.

are being methodically whited out on the
calendar. The sullen new chef (who in-
spires “the kind of sad disgust you’d feel
after seeing an ugly baby”) is acting more
and more strangely. Maureen’s “practiced
jauntiness” is slipping, and not even her
perky clichés, spouted at each set of guests
(“There’s no such thing as bad weather,

adolescent angst Rebecca Rukeyser

Sleaze in the wilderness


W


hat, exactly, is sleaze? It’s
dishonest, disreputable or
immoral behaviour, yes.
It’s also things that are
shabby, sordid, vulgar,
contemptibly low. Yet for 18-year-old Cali-
fornian Mira, that isn’t enough. Deciding
what counts as sleazy has become an all-
consuming obsession, a task approached
with “a taxonomist’s dedication” that takes
up so much of her time she flunked high
school. Her diligent lists include entries
such as: “Cleavage was sleazy, but breasts
were not, themselves, necessarily sleazy”,
“Big rigs were sleazy, but so were four-door
sedans”, “Sleaze mainly occurred indoors,
often in kitchens” and “Glass bricks are
sleazy, but normal bricks are not”.
The main attraction seems to be
that there is something ineffably adult

about sleaziness — and adulthood is
what Mira is desperate to reach. It’s a pain-
fully recognisable adolescent yearning
that’s captured well in Rebecca Rukeyser’s
quirky, wry debut, The Seaplane on
Final Approach.
“People believe Florida is the sleaziest
state, but they are wrong: it is Alaska,” Mira
asserts, and Alaska is where her tale takes
place. She’s working a summer season as a
baker and housekeeper at the Lavender
Island Wilderness Lodge in the Kodiak
archipelago, run by Maureen and Stu, and
planning her “brilliant Alaskan future”.
This mainly involves ensnaring Ed, a 24-
year-old commercial fisherman and her
step-cousin, whom she met briefly the year
before and decided epitomised everything
sleazy (crude anchor tattoo, missing
tooth). Ed doesn’t know about this plan —
Mira masturbates to fantasies of a sea-
plane carrying him crashing nearby and
leaving him “lightly injured” so she can
claim him.
Meanwhile, all is not well at the lodge, a
homestead with no roads, electricity or
phone that is being marketed as a luxury
wilderness destination. Summer bookings

A quirky, wry debut


traces one girl’s quest


for the sordid. Review


by Siobhan Murphy


The Seaplane on
Final Approach
by Rebecca Rukeyser

Granta, 268pp; £12.99

While the teenagers


want adulthood,


the adults are


fetishising youth

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