Novel

 

I gobbled up "God's Own Country" by Ross Raisin in three days. It grabbed me from the first page. Of course "God's Own Country" is a term that is frequently used to describe Yorkshire so that is what probably first caught my eye and indeed the novel is set in Yorkshire - mostly on the North York Moors where there are sheep farms, picture postcard towns and villages and incomers from other parts of the country seeking some sort of rural idyll.

The central character is also the narrator. He is Sam Marsdyke the nineteen year old son of a poor sheep farmer. What should we make of him? He is a fantasist with a big chip on his shoulder. He seems to spend a lot of his spare time brooding alone upon the moors.

Sam is clearly in partial denial about past misdemeanours and his version of events that occur in the novel itself seems unreliable. He is a hard narrator to like or trust. As the novel ends, you wonder what might become of him, suspecting that all will not be well.

In the acknowledgements, Ross Raisin cites "The Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore " by Arnold Kellett which clearly helped to make Sam's narrative voice  sound  authentic.

He reserves a special disdain for country visitors: "Ramblers. Daft sods in pink and green hats. It wasn't even cold. They moved down the field swing-swaying like a line of drunks, addled with the air and the land, and the smell of manure".

And here's Sam observing a school bus as it disgorges pupils from a nearby fee-paying school: "I crouched behind the hedge, spying through the mesh of thorns at the hubbleshoo of small boys spewing out the bus. They were all over the road in an instant, squawking zigzags through the mass to clobber each other round the head with their bags. Next were the little girls, slower, mingled in with the big-belly boys who weren’t so partial on chasing about. And then the older ones. The girls kept separate from the lads, paired up tantling down the road with a snitter of talk kept close between the two as if all they had to say was secrets, meant for the hearing of nobbut themselves."

In this blogpost/review I have tried not to give too much away about the book. The main things I wish to say are that I really enjoyed it and it was quite disturbing too. In America, it was published as "Out Backward". Lord knows what American readers will have thought about all the North Yorkshire dialect words and expressions.