Early in The Offing, Benjamin Myers’s remarkable new novel, the protagonist Robert Appleyard regurgitates a mouthful of anti-German cant. The scene is a cottage at Robin Hood’s Bay on England’s Yorkshire coast; and the time is immediately after the end of the second World War.
Robert is barely 16, but his opinions are already conditioned by the trauma of conflict: by the sight of crippled men sent home to live as best they can in his Co Durham coalmining village; the greyness and pitiless austerity that have accompanied victory.
He has sought escape from the limitations of home, setting out to wander England’s north country rather than go down the pit, taking work where he can get it, treading the road less travelled – but the sights of war have pursued him even to this remote place: as he has turned down towards the coast, he passed the remains of a warplane, which has crashed into the fields, and rusts now for all to see.
No wonder he pulses with indignation against the Germans, who seem to have ruined England as they have ruined themselves. But the older woman with whom he is taking a cup of nettle tea waves away jingoism and thoughtless patriotism: “War is war,” Dulcie Piper tells him, “it’s started by the few and fought by the many, and everyone loses in the end.” And loss – whether by choice, or through carelessness, or political venality – is the governing theme and fear of this book.
It is evident from the onset that this is a tale told from a distance in time, if not of space: Robert’s voice is educated, his vocabulary wide, his destiny has taken him from his coalmining beginnings to university and onward into a different life; and we surmise that this diverging road materialised that day, when he turned off the highway, to take tea with a stranger.
Mythic context
Dulcie, indeed, plays her role in a novel replete with mythic context: benevolent she may be, offering a store cupboard overflowing with goods seldom seen in a time of rationing, a wine store to match, and lobster fresh from the sea – but she retains an air of mystery; and she keeps her youthful pupil at her side until he has learned all he can of her. She has something of Siduri, from the Epic of Gilgamesh; and something of the Odyssey’s Circe. Dulcie’s is a world of plenty and of beauty – but it is unclear if this is to be a paradise lost, or one regained: nature encroaches threateningly; and she keeps a dog that at first seems intent on ripping out Robert’s throat. Indeed, this novel does little to disguise its debt to and absorbed relationship with these foundational myths which hum and pulse through the narrative.
Myers is best known for The Gallows Pole (2017), which won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. That powerful, elemental novel told a tale of the north of England in the 18th century – and thus The Offing is a notable departure. For more than anything, it is that honourable entity – a state-of-the-nation novel, driven by love and concern for England, present and future. Though it seems barely to glance beyond the cloistered confines of the bay, this is a story preoccupied with a vision of a disintegrating world. The waters of Robin Hood’s Bay are “a beautiful mosaic made from a shattered mirror of emerald and malachite”; the North Sea eats inexorably at England’s crumbling east coast; the Durham miners, though they cannot know the details, feel in their bones a bitter future of closed pits and poverty; and out to sea lies Doggerland, where humans once lived before the flood rose and swept their homes away.
Present degraded
The novel’s lyricism is arresting and profoundly moving: nature is observed here in detail and from the roots up; the swallows are returning to their summer homes; and the wild garlic flourishes in the fields. One senses a demand that we also look at society and culture with similar minute attention, and with an understanding of what men and women need in order to live with dignity. The ultimate point, though never pressed, is inescapable: one is reminded of England today, its history denied, its present degraded, its future unravelling. Late in the novel, Dulcie and Robert chance upon a poem called Threnody for the Drowned, and Dulcie explains that threnody “means a song that is sung in mourning. Or a poem. A lament for the deceased”. Perhaps there is a tentative note of optimism in the description of the eroding shoreline as “a sculpture, a work in progress” – but The Offing in its grief and beauty is ultimately a threnody in itself, a lament for the crumbling best of England. This is a novel for our times.
Neil Hegarty’s novel The Jewel will be published by Head of Zeus in October
