The Dig by Cynan Jones
Granta, January 2014
Hardback, 156 pages
Bought by me, from Cogito Books, Hexham
You would be forgiven for thinking that I was currently sponsored by Granta. Quite coincidentally my first three reads of the year have been from them: Night Waking, then The Luminaries and now The Dig. You might remember that it was on my list of most-anticipated books of 2014, and my chosen new release for January. Fitting, because it's a January sort of book, the perfect match to the winter darkness and the icy turn of the year. Short, brutal, bloody and uncompromising; chilly and haunting and disconcertingly raw. All these things, and wonderful.
It alternately weaves two brief narrative threads together, one belonging to the nameless 'big man' and the other to Daniel, a sheep farmer in the Welsh valleys. It is lambing time and the valley is pin-pricked with lights in barns and sheds, as people sit all-night vigils over their flocks 'in isolated private intimacy'. As Daniel watches new lives arriving, the big man presides over the violent senseless deaths of the badgers which he catches for baiting. He uses the cover of darkness to get rid of the remains, posing them on country roads and then ramming over them with his van to conceal wounds caused by the dogs and restraints.
This is how the book begins, sickening and unflinching:
He kicked the badger round a little to unstiffen it. He kicked the head out so it lay exposed across the road. Its top lip was in a snarl and looked exaggerated and some of the teeth were smashed above the lower jaw, hanging loose where they had broken it with a spade to give the dogs a chance.
They hadn't had the ground to dig a pit so they had fastened the badger to a tree to let the lurchers at it and the hind leg was skinned and deeply wire-cut. That could be a problem, he thought. That could be a giveaway... He thought about tearing off the leg. Ag, I wouldn't get it, he thought. I wouldn't get that off.
Bitch, he said: then he ground his foot down on the leg, and stamped over and over, smashing the thin precise line of the wire out of the raw flesh.
The big man is a threat, an embodiment of violence and the excitement of violence; even the inanimate things around him 'feared him somehow'. The novel tenses around him like it is preparing itself for a beating. Reading his sections - as he gases rats, digs for badgers, hides guns under his bath - I took a mental step back, held the book a bit further away.
Daniel couldn't be more opposite. Violence is done to him rather than by him, although not directly. He has just lost his pregnant wife in a freak accident, her head kicked in by a panicked horse, and now he is desperately working his farm alone. The shifts in the lambing shed, previously shared, are merged into one long unending blur. He feels his dead wife all around him, present in the tokens of her left behind. Her boots and waterproofs sat next to his in the doorway; a hankerchief lost during the last harvest and found amongst the sheep feed; her smell in the bedroom. Being immersed in his grief - his 'massive devastation' - is as extreme and traumatic a reading experience as being subjected to the big man's brutality. The Dig ranges the full register of discomfort.
Cynan Jone's prose is mostly precise and uncompromising, occasionally growing biblical in its cadences. It's barely a couple of hours of reading, but I strung it out over the weekend because it demands attention word by word. You could pass over some startling writing if you rushed it:
Around the field crows were turning over the dung and taking up the worms. They made a strange black contrast to the fresh white lambs. Even in their adjutant walking they contrasted. He stood holding the barrow. The hedges were not yet beginning to green up. It was as if there was a holding back to them. The ewes cried ritually and the lambs bleated back and now and then came in from play and pushed roughly as their mothers, their tails frenzied as they drank, and here and there were lambs sleeping in their mothers' lee, folded up and cat-like.
Adjutant walking. The ritual cries of the ewes. The hedges holding back. You can see why Jones' has been called the Welsh Cormac McCarthy. He writes about the meeting of the natural world and the world of men as a mystical confluence of malevolence and great beauty.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the novels' extraordinary setpiece. It squats in the middle of the book - the section was previously published as a short story in Granta magazine and shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2013 - and stands almost alone. It describes the long sweaty process of catching a badger in its sett, using small fierce terriers to corner it inside and then laboriously digging it out from above. The big man recruits another nameless man and his teenage son to help him catch a huge boar, whom he intends to sell to baiters for a few hundred pounds. Told primarily from the teenage boy's point of view it unpicks a destructive culture of masculinity, and the ways in which young men are socialised in violence and conflict. Ultimately the boy is excited to spend a day with his distant and probably abusive father, feeling wanted and like a man. This need for approval leads him to a complicity in the violence against the badger. He associates the satisfaction he feels at the attention, and the big man's compliments on his vicious little ratting dog with the brutality of the thing they are doing.
What the boy cannot see, does not yet know, is that behind the brutality and the physical bravado, is fear. The big man is crushed by fear. His life is one of narrow choices. He cannot be other than what he is, whether because he has been made or born that way. He lives in a sort of hiding, a loner on his piece of land at the mercy of the police, or skulking about in the darkness of the valley. He has recently served a jail term for an unlicensed firearm, and is nervy about being found with either a gun or a live badger. He doesn't want to go back to a cell; he doesn't want to be trapped. The parallel between what he fears for himself and what he does to the badgers is very clear: at an unconscious level he understands what they feel, when they are put in a pit and the dogs are set on them. He understands it and is filled with contempt and bitterness towards them; the violence he commits against them is like killing that part of himself which he most detests. It is an excoricating portrait of vulnerability.
And the land itself broods and grieves. Daniel becomes obsessed with the idea that his tragedy began when ditching work removed a metal shard from one of his fields. It has been there as long as anyone remembers, and has acquired the presence of a shrine or a totem. Removing it disturbs the order of things, releases some malicious influence with the big man as its emissary.
Cynan Jones' won a Betty Trask Award for his first novel, The Long Dry, and has written an installment in Seren's New Stories of the Mabinogion. I'm really eager to read both of these now, and his second novel Everything I Found on the Beach too. The Dig is already a contender for my best of 2014. Buy it. Read it.
~~Victoria~~