The imprint of a book is most often as ephemeral as a meteor’s trail:  unless like Hailey’s comet, its brightness returns again and again to mark it out in our collective memory.

Writers are understandably concerned with the markers their work leaves behind, so how should we judge the afterlife of God’s Own Country - the feathery end- tails of the comet, if you like? 

Although the first spotlight of scrutiny is now well over in our online discussion, I have come across this book subsequently in unexpected places: on the occasion of an 80th Birthday Party, for instance, where there were certain ladies of a very certain age, who had read it together and were set against the book as violent and awful, the main character being, as they saw it, immoral and beyond sympathy. One or two were from Yorkshire and it came out that they regarded the dialect as cobbled together, dragged out of a dictionary, time and place.  There was no doubt that the book had been thoroughly passed round: the local gardener- a man of the world and well-read, to all accounts- didn’t like it: he’d got half way through and found it ‘not to his taste’.

As for my own circle of readers, a probation officer colleague commented over coffee in July that the writer ‘obviously’ had no first-hand knowledge of prison-life.  Well. I wouldn’t know. A month or so later, an American friend dismissed the book as an offbeat, sour little book and a strange offering from Penguin to reading groups. In effect, the dissatisfactions seem to be more to do with questions of authenticity and tone, rather than the actual writing: the idea that something in the book is out of joint with life as known, the lack of a recognizable ‘inner fire’, the downright lack of appeal to its intended audience of reading groups.

 When I look back on God’s Own Country, what I first admired as the tightly written, controlled idiom, the impeccably crafted style, may be a clue as to what the book really is – an artefact rather than art, too limited by the narrow, damaged vision of the central character, with all else as background contrivance. 

A meteor without a tail, then, rather than a shining star. 

But this isn’t to say that we won’t see something by this author the next time round, which will burn more brightly.

     

                                                     Kate Wilson