The Times - UK (2022-06-11)

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