The Wanderers by Tim Pears review – a hypnotic paean to rural England
The second instalment of Pears’s West Country trilogy, set in the run-up to the first world war, is testament to his uncommon skill
Last January The Horseman, the first instalment in Tim Pears’s West Country trilogy, introduced us to young Leo Sercombe, a Devon carter’s son with an exceptional affinity for horses. Set in the early 20th century, it is a gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England, recreating in its myopic focus, languid pace and spare prose a way of being in the world that is all but unrecoverable to our hyperconnected modern minds. Unfolding slowly, it saves its punch for the final pages when Leo’s friendship with Lottie Prideaux, the local landowner’s daughter, at last brings disaster down upon him. The Wandererscontinues the story of both Leo and Lottie, and with little in the way of conventional plot to drive the narrative, it is largely the question of whether they will find one another again, and how, and when, that pulls the reader along.
That it does so, without question, is testament to Pears’s uncommon skill. It is no mean feat for a writer to eschew the tyranny of cliffhangers, coincidences and plot twists, instead trusting the reader to stay with them for the sheer pleasure of the writing and the interest in the world conjured up. It requires unwavering confidence; a consistency of pace and vision that must be there from the outset, and must not falter; and something withheld, however subtly, that creates an itch to turn the page.
His writing slips between gorgeously sonorous Old Testament rhythms and clipped, verbless sentences
None of this is to say that nothing happens in The Wanderers. Having been driven from his home, Leo (usually referred to as “the boy”) lives for a time with Gypsies, then with a hermit, and works in a Dartmoor mine and on a farm. Lottie pursues a fascination for anatomy, endures her father’s remarriage, and unwillingly prepares herself to be sent to Germany to be “finished”. Slowly, incrementally, Pears sets the stage for the final book in the trilogy.
In common with many contemporary novelists who are drawn to describe the relationship between men and landscape – for instance, Cynan Jonesand Ben Myers – Pears seems to owe a debt to Cormac McCarthy. His writing slips between gorgeously sonorous Old Testament rhythms and clipped, verbless sentences (“He ate the meat and bread crouched upon the rock in his fine suit, and beheld the horse below and knew not whether he was blessed or cursed. Wealthy or poor. Free or bound. Joyful or desolate. In time he might discover”). Similar, too, is the almost anthropological detachment of the narrator and a wordless unsentimentality that nevertheless becomes highly emotionally charged as masculine vulnerability is revealed in spite of the characters’ best efforts. But McCarthy devotees need not be concerned about encountering some kind of pastiche in these pages: The Horseman and The Wanderers are much gentler and less elemental, and their bucolic, prewar, West Country world could not be more different from the harsh landscapes of the American west.
It is the first world war, of course, that hangs over these books, and which Pears so deftly employs (and avoids). It’s impossible to set a book in 1912 without fencing in some way with its shadow, but he does not rush us towards it too precipitately. Instead, the coming conflict is foreshadowed here and there, but in the subtlest of ways:
They each stood and watched whatever it was growing larger, approaching them through the air. Bearing down upon them, flying low and fast along the ridge, straight as arrows. Leo felt his knees weaken … the two mute swans rose and flew over them, a yard or two above their heads.
The Wanderers is peppered with moments of awestruck wonder at the natural world, often related to birds, for Leo is a noticer, and in his own way, a thinker. Their effect is to remind us that, just a century ago, life for ordinary people was full of mysteries that could not be resolved by typing a keyword into Google. This meant that experience itself – thought, curiosity, imagination – was differently textured, something that many writers of books set in the past fail to take into account when they remove modern technology but ignore the phenomenological implications of a world without it. For instance, there were far fewer mirrors; news travelled slowly, if at all; many people journeyed no further than a few miles from their home, few expected to move faster than a horse could carry them. In both this book and its forerunner, the care that has been taken with historical research is obvious; but it is this deeper, subtler layer of reconstruction that sets these moving novels apart.
No comments:
Post a Comment