Book review: The Offing, by Benjamin Myers

In recent years there has been something which might not be called a phenomenon, and certainly not a trend, but perhaps just a slight whether in the weather. Over several years judging literary prizes, the “regional” novel, particularly about England, has seemed more prominent in both quantity and quality. I am thinking of works like Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country, The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs, Joanna Kavenna’s Come To The Edge, Nicola Barker’s Burley Cross Postbox Theft, Max Porter’s Lanny and the eerie novels of Andrew Michael Hurley. It is a form that seems to circulate between satire and gothic, between aghast astonishment and awful familiarity, between elegy and ecstasy. Indeed, the rise of such novels seems coterminous with the rise in popularity of nature writing. They are worlds of noticing.

Benjamin Myers PIC: Adelle Stripe

To this can be added The Offing by Benjamin Myers. It is a moving and subtle novel in many ways, infused with a love of the minute pleasures in life, and the lasting regrets. Robert Appleyard is a 16-year-old from Durham, brought up in the expectation that he will soon go down the pits.

His “gap year”, as it were, is to ramble in the countryside. This is not so much to see the world, as to see, at least, the sea in Scarborough or Whitby. Although a prologue sets up the ending, and the epilogue confirms it, the reader might be taken aback by his surprising eloquence. This is not a record, but it is a reminiscence of a year that changed him. It also changed the person he met on his peregrinations.

After a night under the stars, and having worked in fields and homesteads, young Robert stumbles upon a cottage owned by Dulcie Piper. Dulcie is elderly, caustic, bohemian, foul-mouthed and a brilliant cook with limited resources. The novel is set just after the Second World War and the ruined peace thereafter casts a shadow over the book. Unexpectedly, Robert and Dulcie begin to form a tentative friendship. He keeps saying he wants to go away, and she keeps finding reasons to keep him. Despite the rather glorious descriptions of nature, the core of the novel is a young man finding, through kindness and food, that the world is bigger than he thought it might be.

It is a novel full of quotable passages. Of the post-war period, Robert muses that “hunger rather than conflict was the great fear these days”. As he refurbishes a little sit-ooterie on Dulcie’s property he inevitably finds the reason for her grief, and a path towards his own future. Dulcie is a glorious character: irreverent, pessimistic, an opportunist, a woman implacably opposed to “the janitors of mediocrity. The custodians of the drab and peddlers of dreck. Where once we built towers to heaven, now we built frumpy sweatboxes for pen-pushers.” Part of this novel’s charm is that nostalgic innocence; the reader rather than the narrator realises just how much a carapace this sarcasm and snarl truly is.

It is difficult to read the book without reading into the book. At one point, a description of the cliffs nearby is glossed: “Each was a bookmark, placed in Britain’s ongoing story.” At another we hear of badgers being part of “unseen England”. Europe is in rack and ruin in this novel, and a kind of chthonic Englishness is both redemption and harbour. There is even a scene with a lonely widow weeping in a small church, privately commemorating the dead. (I do not mean this as any disparagement, but anyone who likes Call The Midwife will lap this up).

The novel does hang together, although the epiphanies through the natural world, brandy and exposure to literature might seem a bit too twee for some tastes. But it does have an honest heart, and a sense of the difference small things can make. The exchanges between the naïf and the eccentric are full of a kind of salty charm, and the perceptions about limited opportunities are done with grace and with a simmering anger. It is a book that puts a woman centre stage (and Dulcie certainly likes to be the centre of attention) without condescension and without reproof. She just is, and she may not like being who she is, but boyo, she will stick with it.

Why this upsurge in the parochial novel? It’s not as if the greats didn’t get by while by-passing the metropolis – Wuthering Heights, The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Middlemarch – but this seems new. We don’t know our own country, and we usually find it fearful and sorrowful. The great point of The Offing is to reimagine it as haven and harbour and home. What, you might ask, is The Offing? It is on one side a meteorological occurrence at sea. It is also what you think it is – as in the phrase “did off with himself”. How these combine is beautifully done.

The true wonder of this book is that it is actually about goodness. Henri de Montherlant said that happiness wrote with white ink on white paper. This proves otherwise. Stuart Kelly

The Offing, by Benjamin Myers, Bloomsbury Circus, £16.99. Benjamin Myers is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 20 August