OUT BACKWARD

London-resident Raisin’s first novel is a chilling—at times terrifying—narrative set in rural Yorkshire.

Sam Marsdyke is 19 and no longer in school, primarily because he’d been accused of rape when caught in a compromising position with a girl in his classroom, so he now works on his father’s farm. Farm life depicted here is gritty and grimy and includes sheep-dipping and dog-whelping. Sam’s life has a certain order determined by the flow of the seasons, but things change when a neighboring farm is bought by “towns” (i.e., rich city-folk), allowing Sam to come in contact with 15-year-old Jo Reeves. Given Sam’s past, it’s obviously not advisable to get these two together, but they’re brought together by boredom and by an alienation from modern culture. Eventually things get so bad for Jo at home that she decides to run away, and she persuades Sam to accompany her. What starts as something of a lark, scampering on the Moors à la Cathy and Heathcliff, becomes ominous. After sating themselves in the dining car of a local train, they’re dropped off near Whitby and soon find themselves needing to forage for food. They collude in stealing canned goods from a grocer but are recognized and then become fugitives on the lam. While Jo is ready to return to her cushier life, Sam becomes more controlling, more dominant and more threatening. Because the novel is told through Sam’s eyes, we’re seduced into his way of seeing, and we sense the growing threat posed to Jo but can do nothing about it. Sam’s speech has a quaint, rural quality, part Yorkshire poetry and (seemingly) part Anthony Burgess: “my senses were daffled and out of kilter”; “we were powfagged after our adventures”; “he glegged at his charver but he didn’t know what to do neither.”

A novel successful in creating a mood of menace.