On Fiona Mozley's Elmet, the Booker-shortlisted novel written on a mobile phone
When Fiona Mozley’s debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize earlier this year, news reports claimed that she had written all, if not most, of it on her mobile phone. A pleasant if unexpected change from all those novelists who confess that they simply cannot get started unless they have just the right quality of stationery or stock of sharpened pencils.
Mozley started the book, she has said, while on the train commute between her home in United Kingdom's York and an internship in London. Watching the Yorkshire countryside go by, she started to muse on “what the relationship between a person and a place was”, a train of thought that led to Elmet, the book that’s now reached the shortlist. At 29, she’s the youngest author on the list.
I thought it would be fitting, then, that I read and write about Elmet in the same manner that it was composed: on my own mobile phone. This is a device on which I, for one, haven’t written a novel. Texts, tweets, messages, notes and mails: yes. Fiction: no. Here, then, is the fruit of my thumbed labour.
As the epigraph that quotes a verse by Ted Hughes indicates, Elmet refers to a vanished Celtic kingdom in Yorkshire. Mozley’s novel, set in the near-present, deals with the fortunes of an unusual family comprising a father, a giant of a man who earns his living by bare-knuckle fighting in local contests; a 15-year-old daughter, a girl with pent-up appetites and furies; and an impressionable, gender-conflicted 13-year-old son, who tells us their story of their lives in retrospect while he mentally and physically journeys back to his homestead.
A few pages in, and I realise that reading an entire book on a phone is something I could get used to. I may not prefer it to print or to an e-book, but it’s not undoable.
The only problem is an infernal urge to fiddle. Every so often I switch fonts, point sizes and background shades and then switch them back again. Eventually, this diminishes to acceptable levels. (Including, to my pleasant surprise, the itch to check e-mail and social media updates.)
Mozley’s sentences are striking, managing to be tough and tender at the same time. “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives,” one reads, a deliberate calling forth of the links between person and place the author has spoken about. In this manner, she accretes rich and memorable details of the landscape, interiors, clothes, food and more.
Writing fully formed sentences on a touchscreen keypad is tricky, though. At least for me, it is; perhaps it’s to do with the size of my thumbs or that I hasten to put down words before they disappear from thought. As has been widely noted, predictive text is hit-or-miss – but when one turns it off, one is confronted by strings of unintelligible letters. One soldiers on, fingers crossed.
To begin with, Elmet’s chapters progress in the manner of overlapping episodes, speaking of the children’s interrupted stint in school, Christmas Eve celebrations, archery lessons, their father’s dealings with others, and more. Thus, it immerses us in a layered portrait of a realm that is aslant from our times. “In another world,” the boy recalls, “we might have grown up faster, but this was our strange, sylvan otherworld, so we did not.”
Soon enough, though, the narrative gathers momentum. The father takes the lead in organising resistance against a group of rapacious landlords; the locals start to come together for the cause; the landowners devise stratagems to regain power.
The latter half, with a nail-biting fight scene and its spiralling consequences, is almost unbearably tense and gripping. A tip: if you’re reading it on a phone screen, you’d be well-advised to turn off all those pesky notifications.
At the very end, one realises that the Gothic notes of the finale are cleverly foreshadowed from the start. (“It’s sort of like a Western, but set in Yorkshire,” the author has commented.) However, it can also be said that there are moments in the book that are overdone – for example, when people speak overtly of collectivism and the old ways.
Happily enough, though, I managed to remain riveted, even during an especially bumpy commute, and also managed to sneak in a few paragraphs during office meetings. (Shh.) It’s the narrative, the atmosphere and the language that stay in mind after the book is finished. Make sure your battery is charged.