Review: THE WANDERERS by Tim Pears

It seems a little perverse that Leo Sercombe is described as “A vagabond upon the face of the earth” as The Wanderers (Bloomsbury) opens. Exiled he most certainly is from the pastoral paradise of the pre-WWI rural West Country he described with a naturalist’s eye in The Horseman (2017), but Leo is no Cain. Instead he is a victim of violence, a boy brutally beaten by his father and banished from Lord Prideaux’s estate for daring to consort with Lottie Prideaux, even though their bond is more rooted in a shared love of horses than any tentative romance.
  Aiming for Penzance, following a rumour of distant family, the young Leo embarks on an odyssey in a minor key. He falls in with gypsies who rescue him from starvation and exposure; finds roof and shelter on a pitiably poor sheep farm; descends deep into the played-out copper mines of the West Country; and is taken under the wing of a traumatised veteran of the Boer War. Despite his harsh experiences, however, Leo retains a childlike wonder at the miracles of the natural world. Even on the brink of death he observes the flora and fauna through a prism of instinctive spirituality: “Leo did not know what day it was. He decided it was Sunday. He watched the swallows for as long as he would have been in church, this his open air Evensong.”
  While The Horseman was very much Leo’s bildungsroman, however, The Wanderers, as the title suggests, is equally concerned with Lottie. Her own odyssey mirrors Leo’s adventures as she chafes under the constraints of behaving as a young lady of the manor should, secretly pursuing an investigation into the natural world as she dissects dead birds and animals, and rejecting her father’s expectation that confines her education to that befitting a young woman bred to marry well and nothing more.
  While Leo disappears into the leafy byways of Devon and Cornwall in the south of England, “Lottie Prideaux discovered that she was invisible by degrees . . . accustomed to passing through the rooms and along the corridors of the manor house unnoticed by the maids, or riding her horse Blaze unseen by the stable lads or farm workers”.
  The second in a proposed trilogy, The Wanderers is more influenced by contemporary events than was The Horseman, which took place in an ostensibly idyllic and self-contained world. Attending the 1913 Derby, Lottie hears that “a madwoman had bobbed under the rails and calmly walked out into the middle of the course”. Her companion, Alice, cries for the jockey, Anmer, who was thrown: “The poor, poor man. I pray to God he lives.” Leo, meanwhile, is shown a D-shaped scar by which one of the gypsies, Samson, was branded a deserter during the Boer War. Later he comes to live with Rufus, a tramp suffering from what would today be diagnosed as PTSD as a consequence of his experiences during that war. Cyrus, a farmer, assures Leo there will be no war with Germany, it being the case that “tradin’ partners don’t fight each other”. By the time the novel concludes in 1915, however, Lottie is cantering Blaze toward imaginary German trenches, raising her wooden sword and yelling “Chaaaaarge!”.
  Meanwhile, the British Empire, run by “second-class” people, is crumbling. “There were first-class and third-class carriages on the train. Second class did not exist. [. . . ] Second-class people were shipped out to man the Empire shortly after the railways were invented.” Later, a mine owner tells Leo that West Country mining is dying out because buyers can now purchase cheaper ore from Malaya. “So much for the Empire, eh? Does it help us?”
Leo and Lottie represent a generation who will have to come to terms with Britain’s seismic changes in the wake of the first World War. It’s a tale scraped bare of sentiment but told in a lyrical style, a taut and muscular poetry evocative of Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Hardy, a story that functions as a harbinger of great change to come and yet also serves as a paean to lost innocence, as Leo and Lottie efface themselves from history to disappear “into a parallel time of no past or future but only an ever on-rolling now”.

  Declan Burke is an author and journalist. He is currently Dublin City Council / UNESCO writer-in-residence.

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Review: THE HORSEMAN by Tim Pears

Opening in rural Devon in 1911, The Horseman (Bloomsbury) is a bildungsroman centring on Leo Sercombe, a young schoolboy who lives on the estate of Lord Prideaux. The son of a carter, and old enough now to help with the horses, Leo is attuned to nature’s rhythms and knowledgeable enough on the Bible to recognise the prelapsarian potential of his surroundings. “He might have been the first human upon the earth,” Leo muses as he walks home from school, “striding through the garden. He doubted whether there were any places so beautiful in all the planets known or unknown to man, or to God.”
  Previously the winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Lannan Literary Award, Tim Pears has built his reputation on novels that employ the family dynamic to explore social issues. The Horseman, his ninth novel and the first in a proposed trilogy, situates the Sercombe family in an apparently idyllic and self-contained world in which the horrors of WWI are unimaginable and history-making events (Home Rule, the miners’ strikes, ‘the Vandals and Goths’ of the suffragette movement) are little more than vague rumours. Rural Devon is a place where ‘things’ll carry on one way or another,’ as Albert Sercombe reassures his wife, but Leo’s fall from grace, precipitated by the passion for horses he shares with the haughty young Charlotte Prideaux, is the inevitable consequence of Leo transgressing against the social structure of his time and place.
  While the bare bones of the plot are evocative of Hardy, The Horseman is a novel in which plot is little more than a skeletal structure that allows Tim Pears to flesh out a vibrant, vividly detailed Devon. Leo, our guide, has a gift for observation, and is a rudimentary philosopher to boot. Thus, when he watches a hare approach him across a field, Leo is drawn to the conclusion that, “each species of animal had its own peculiarities of vision. This world we surveyed was not was it was but as it was seen, in many different guises.”
  The story proceeds by way of chapters divided into the months of the year, each month devoted to an important event on the farm: the ploughing, the sowing and reaping, the threshing; foals being born, pigs slaughtered. Unsentimental in tone, the story is richly descriptive as Pears sketches in the detail of a community’s symbiotic relationship to the land, as man imposes his will on chaotic nature: “No two fields among them were of like size or configuration. No tracks ran straight but dipped and wove around the tumps and hummocks of land. […] Streams meandered in no discernible direction, cutting deep narrow gullies here, trickling over gravel beds there. Erratic walkways crisscrossed the estate. The boy’s father Albert told him that when God created this corner of the world He’d just helped himself to a well-earned tipple.”
  Pears is at his best, however, in charting Leo’s abiding love for horses, an instinctive devotion handed down from generation to generation. “He gazed upon the sets of waggon harness […] Plough strings, cart saddles, cobble trees and swingletrees, each hung on wooden pegs in its allotted place. These were the icons of beauty to the boy.” As young as he is, Leo is sure of his destiny: “He knew that he would work with horses all his life […]. He doubted whether one life was long enough to know all there was to know of horses.” The timeless nature of man’s relationship with the horse is confirmed when Leo watches his father “ride the mower … like one of those Canaanites who lived in the valley land and had chariots of iron.” When Leo finally races a full-grown horse, he is transported: “The boy did not know that such exhilaration existed, save for in the last days when young men shall see visions ...”
  Seeded with deliciously archaic fragments of language (‘dawcock’, ‘zart’, ‘guddled’, ‘gatfer’), The Horseman is itself an exhilarating vision, a bittersweet elegy for the innocent certainties of an agrarian world before the industrialised horrors of the 20th century come crashing down. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Times.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: FAULKS ON FICTION: GREAT BRITISH CHARACTERS AND THE SECRET LIFE OF THE NOVEL by Sebastian Faulks

Lists are fine things, particularly if you’re in an argumentative mood, and FAULKS ON FICTION, being a list of great fictional British characters, is especially provocative. Faulks, the author of ‘Birdsong’ and other very fine novels, has divided his book into four headings: ‘Heroes’, ‘Lovers’, ‘Snobs’ and ‘Villains’, offering seven examples in each section. Thus the book takes us on an odyssey through British literature that begins in the Caribbean with ROBINSON CRUSOE and meanders right through to the present day, culminating in Faulks’ take on Barbara Covett, the villain of Zoë Heller’s NOTES ON A SCANDAL.
  Along the way we encounter some of the greats of the British novel, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Henry Fielding, Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy.
  Given that the book was written as a tie-in with the recent BBC series of the same name, the style is unsurprisingly light and breezy. It’s also very readable, in part because Faulks spends a good chunk of his introduction debunking the various literary critiques that bedevilled the development of the novel in the late 20th century. It may be ‘old-fashioned’ he says, but he is determined to treat the characters as if they were real people, gauging their worth in terms of the impact they’ve had on the reading public.
  It’s a laudable ambition, although Faulks’ modus operandi works better for some characters than others. When writing about personal favourites, such as Emma Woodhouse or Sherlock Holmes, Faulks is intensely engaging (although prone to hyperbole: “Is there no flaw in this dazzling, Mozartian performance?” he wonders of Jane Austen’s EMMA). On the other hand, some chapters have a cursory feel, and read like little more than synopses with occasional digressions.
  What is most disappointing about the collection is its predictability. “The novel was, from the start, a popular and middle-class form,” says Faulks during his chapter on Fielding’s TOM JONES, and his selection of characters seems determined to prove that the novel - or more properly, the literary novel - is still very much a middle-class obsession. The roll-call of names will be familiar to most readers, from Daniel Defoe to Dickens, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë to William Golding and Doris Lessing, up to the present day and Martin Amis, Alan Hollingsworth and Monica Ali.
  In fact, and despite the ‘British’ flavour promised in the subtitle, the collection is a very English one, even when the characters under discussion are marooned on a desert island, mired in the Indian Raj, or immigrants from Bangladesh.
  Furthermore, there is very little that is challenging to the status quo. No Lawrence Durrell, for example, who was being touted in the 1960s as the next James Joyce. Indeed, there’s no James Joyce. John Fowles merits only a line or two; Mary Renault only one, and that in terms of her early, ‘lesbian’ novels. Olivia Manning goes unmentioned, as does Kazuo Ishiguro, while Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson merit only token references, if that.
  Stevenson, perhaps above all others, has good reason to be miffed at his exclusion. Long John Silver and the Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde doppelganger are two of the most memorable characters in the history of the novel, and it beggars belief that not even one of Stevenson’s heroes or villains was deemed worthy of inclusion.
  One non-literary character who did sneak into the collection is James Bond, in the ‘Snobs’ section of the book. Unfortunately, Faulks does himself - and his argument in favour of literary snobs - no favours by spending most of the chapter talking about his own very enjoyable experience of writing a Bond novel, DEVIL MAY CARE (2009). Not that there is anything wrong with the chapter per se, but it’s telling that Faulks’ mini-biography at the end of the book lists all of his own novels bar DEVIL MAY CARE.
  This snobbishness about the literary novel reaches a climax late in the collection, when Faulks discusses Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE, which is regarded as one of the earliest examples of the thriller. Rather than celebrate the crime genre on its own terms, however, Faulks prefaces his exploration of the novel’s villain, Count Fosco, by recounting how plot-driven novels fell out of favour in the 20th century, only to be reinvigorated not by the various genre fictions of crime, science-fiction and romance, but by Proust’s A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU and Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY. Were he not so serious, the proposition would be laughable.
  At times, Faulks is so beautifully precise that you almost forgive him his blinkered outlook. The happy-go-lucky Tom Jones is “a jolly cork on a choppy sea”; writing about love, or Graham Greene’s version of same, Faulks says, “All culture is for it; almost all history is against it.”
  Such insights are few and far between, however. FAULKS ON FICTION makes for an entertaining read, but it’s little more than a primer for those who have forgotten the main plot points of some of the great English novels. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post