The very first page of Fiona Mozley’s debut novel foregrounds the violence contained within its pages. The narrator is escaping destruction and searching for someone. Pain and helplessness drip off the words. Soon enough, we meet the 14-year-old narrator Daniel, his sister Cathy, and father known to his children only as Daddy, who is a prize fighter by profession, “Daddy was gargantuan. Each of his arms was as thick as two of theirs. His fists were near the size of their heads. Each of them could have sat curled up inside his ribcage like a foetus.”
Though others are intimidated by his size, his children know that his violence will never be directed against them. He is open with them about his work and the fact that he has killed.
Early on, we are shown that Daddy has a strong sense of justice. A farm worker is kicked by a cow and left paralysed. Unable to recover the money a rich man owes him, it is to Daddy he turns. There is a vague sense of a Robin Hood complex, though Daddy does not rob the rich to feed the poor. And the land is peopled by the poor: labourers on farms and mines. The rich are making money from “men’s muscles and women’s skins.” All they want is the land and they don’t care how they get it.
It is into this atmosphere that Daddy brings his motherless children. He’s removed them from school when the headmistress doesn’t believe that Cathy and Dan were bullied by other boys and that Cathy was only responding in self-defence. He builds a house on land that doesn’t belong to him and hunts with bow and arrow.
The man who owns the land is Mr. Price, one of the richest landowners in the area and one not particularly worried about the law of the land. His word is the law and he has men to ensure it’s enforced. Daddy and Mr. Price have a history; not only were they rivals in love but Daddy was also one of Mr. Price’s men. He turns against his employer and begins to gather the workers to stand against Mr. Price’s exploitation. Price wants revenge: “He must return to the fold. I used to own that man’s muscles, and I owned his mind.”
As the confrontation between Daddy and Mr. Price hots up, you know that things are not going to end well. Interspersed between the pages is Daniel’s search for his sister. As we head towards a bloody climax, the reader’s attention is held by Cathy and Daddy. Even as a youngster, Cathy is aware of that her gender makes her vulnerable. She is an angry loner.
Daniel is more observant and drawn to the outside world. But he is also an innocent, unable to understand that men can be vicious and evil. And he has total faith that Cathy will protect him. It explains why Daniel will not stop searching.
Elmet; Fiona Mozley, Hachette, ₹550
