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From abandoned quarries to dingy pubs, tales of love and loss form a novel full of insight, empathy and wry laughter
Set against the 1984 miners’ strike, James Clarke’s first novel The Litten Path won the 2019 Betty Trask prize and made itself at home with poverty, localism and landscape. Hollow in the Land explores similar territory, but shifts the action from a Yorkshire pit village to a valley in Lancashire, somewhere among the clusters of towns and islands of moorland. Thirteen fragmentary glimpses of valley life follow the contours if not the map: the novel emerges from these stories, as an oblique but steadily focusing picture of the way things are.
Moody eccentricity prevails, often at the edge of violence. Contrasts between fantasy and realism flicker like the light on the abandoned quarries, the ailing sawmill, the dingy pubs. In the chapter called “Field Mouse”, Jim and Lenny, a boy of 11 and a girl a little older, befriend the drunk former sailor from next door. His house is smelly, full of poorly stuffed animals. He shows off his “staff” with its hare’s-skull handle; his wrist, tattooed with a set of numbers beneath a complicated compass design – the key, perhaps, to some underland from the imagination of Alan Garner. In a children’s book he would be their guide to an occult layer of the world. What he’s a guide to here is quite different. Continue reading...