Neil Campbell
Beastings by Ben Myers (review)
The influence of Cormac McCarthy is evident in the first sentence of this novel. But as far as
I know, McCarthy has never been to Cumbria. From the unpunctuated dialogue to the italicized
biblical quotations to characters called the Priest and the Poacher, the influence remains clear.
Think of the Judge in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, one of the great grotesques in the whole of
literature. McCarthy was once asked why he didn’t write about women, and his refreshingly
honest answer was that he didn’t know anything about them. But Myers’ central protagonist is a
young woman, and he delineates her plight with great compassion.
There are many approaches to writing beautiful sentences. Someone once said ‘read all of
Faulkner, and then read Hemingway to get the Faulkner out of your system.’ Faulkner begat
McCarthy begat Myers. That’s good company. Hallowed company. Nobody reads Faulkner in
England anymore. If they ever did. The writing is wondrous, like moonlight after a few sips of
moonshine.
Here are some beautiful sentences from Myers: the poacher’s hair ‘stood like the hackles of
a fell terrier that’s cornered a fox’, ‘she thought the roar of the sky was the true sound of
loneliness and could not stay there any longer’, ‘dust was dancing over mossy humps and rotted
stumps’, ‘she opened the jar and inhaled the tingling sting of vinegar’, ‘the silk gossamer strands
of kiting spiders’. Wonderful, vivid stuff. You don’t need to look at this writer’s back catalogue to
see that he’s a poet too. All the great novelists have been immersed in poetry, whether they
admitted it or not. Great writers enjoy all the literary forms.
Poetic and lyrical language can add to the pleasure of the reading if it doesn’t become too
self-indulgent, as often happens in the windiest passages of Nabokov and Updike. Conrad was
the all-time maestro in terms of lyrical language. Turgenev a close second. This kind of
language is the difference between walking down a high street or a Bezhin meadow.
Faulkner said he wrote about the human heart. Beastings is sustained by the heart of the
girl, and her tortured progress through the Cumbrian countryside. This brings me to another
strength: the evocation of place. The damp cruelty and majesty of the wet fells is captured
marvelously. As a reader I was immersed in this novel. I also enjoyed this novelist’s knowledge
of plant life and birds, a knowledge that gave further authority to the work. For me the book
came alive with the appearance of the skinny tour guide Tom Solomon. It was at this point I
stopped thinking about McCarthy, and saw a little more of what Myers could bring. As with the
middle aged couple in the tent there was humour here too.
This Cumbrian gothic elevates itself beyond the merely linear through sparse moments of
exquisitely captured grotesque violence. I wondered at first if this book was going to be an
allegory about fostering, or adoption, or something along those lines. It is hard not to look for
allegory in a book such as this, but by the end I contented myself with discerning the numerous
parallels with unsavoury aspects of contemporary society, a primary role of the novel.
This novel grips, and gathers pace throughout. It positively hurtles towards its fevered finale,
an utterly extraordinary ending. An extraordinary novel. A fine achievement, something to be
proud of. A novel I will never forget. I had thought only Americans could write like this.
Neil Campbell’s first novel, ‘Sky Hooks’ comes out in 2016.